YP White Papers
The SSSI Young Professionals are active at conferences across Australia, and are excited to share with you their reflections, learnings and collective understanding of the nature of the challenges that young professionals face in the Australian geospatial industry and the unique opportunities that they bring to transform the industry as we head towards a bright future.
Locate19 Young Professionals White Paper: How and Why Young Professionals in Geospatial are important for the industry
In April 2019 at Locate19, the inaugural Young Professionals Symposium was held, among a suite of other young professionals activities at Locate19, Australia's annual national spatial conference.
Key findings from the Locate19 Young Professionals White Paper were:
1. Generational differences in existing professionals within the industry creates an environment where miscommunications or misunderstandings happen based on values and attitudes, not on technical proficiency or innovation. Finding ways to overcome this more effectively will allow for businesses to embrace the capacity for collaboration that young professionals. This also opens up the pathway for more effective advocacy in the industry at large.
2. Students and young professionals in the industry can often experience judgement due to their young age and hence perceived lack of experience, despite having sought out broad technical backgrounds and diverse project experiences. Unconscious bias around age is an important issue that our industry can work to overcome.
3. Academia isn’t equipped to provide a graduate all of the skills required to enter the workforce, and industry has the opportunity step in and partner with academia to provide soft skills (communication, career goal setting, marketing, entrepreneurship, etc). While this is happening in some areas, there is scope for industry and academia to ‘speak the same language’ more effectively for the betterment of the industry’s future.
View this White Paper here
South East Asia Survey Congress 2019 White Paper: Opportunities and Challenges for Young Professionals in Geospatial
Following on from Locate19, there was an exponential increase in interest in young professionals in the industry at the South East Asia Survey Congress 2019 Young Professionals Day, which had a broad range of people from diverse backgrounds gather to discuss, explore and better understand these same issues.
The key findings from the SEASC2019 Young Professionals Day were:
1. Our YPs are the future of our industry, but also the now - young at heart professionals need to start succession planning with the YPs in mind to help continue their legacies, and most importantly need to start giving YPS opportunities to develop their skills and experience with this in mind.
2. The culture of surveying urgently needs to adapt to embrace change, or another industry will fill the niche that rapid technological advances and AI creates - we will be left behind. Career pathway visibility and embracing soft skills is vital and urgent at all levels of the workforce.
3. Career pathway visibility is an immense gap that we can relatively easily address. It is needed to get more people to stay in our industry, not only to get more people into our industry, both urgent matters globally.
4. YPs are urgently seeking leadership over management, and demographically have different needs. As an industry, businesses need to adapt to embrace this - flexible work, diversity and inclusion, career pathway visibility, mentoring and coaching, etc.
View this White Paper here