IDOM: Professional career development and GIS research topics

Last December 1st, GEOTEC – UJI (Castellón) hosted an industry talk addressed to our Erasmus Mundus students and GEO-C ESRs, by renowned experts from the GIS sector: Jesus de Diego and Jelena Stosic. These are some brief notes from the talk.

The day opened with Jelena who, as senior consultant connecting university-company, introduced the vision and aims of the company. IDOM is an international consultancy firm in the field of engineering, architecture and consulting. IDOM provides integrated services across multiple business areas and sectors such as utilities and energy, transport, environment, and e-government across the world (44 offices in 25 countries!). In Spain, IDOM has offices in Bilbao, Madrid, Valencia and Seville.
Jesus covered professional opportunities in the GIS sector and examined desired skills and competences for GIS professionals, remarking that increasingly GIS and IT is a tight couple and will be even reinforced in the coming years. Deeping into career development, three GIS profiles were identified: GIS users, GIS experts, and GIS technicians. The latter profile implies having strong IT skills. GIS technician is further divided into specific profiles such as Project manager, GIS consultant, GIS analytics and GIS developer.
Afterwards, Jesus – taking the role of senior GIS consultant and project manager – summarised three successful projects deployed by IDOM (full list at https://10.2.20.222/wrodpress/projects).

I hope the talk will be a definitive take-off for building up a prolonged and strong academia-industry relationship, and to connect GEOTEC research members and its students to stakeholders, as interested actors in industry or government.