What's your job about?
Eagle Technology offers Geographic Information System (GIS) solutions that enable efficient spatial data management and analysis. Their GIS technology facilitates mapping, visualization, and interpretation of geospatial data for diverse applications. By integrating geographic information with various data sources, Eagle Technology helps businesses and organizations make informed decisions, manage assets, analyse trends, and enhance planning and resource allocation.
Through their GIS solutions, they empower users to unlock insights from location-based data, improving overall spatial understanding and decision-making processes. As a GIS graduate at Eagle Technology, my role has been varied from multiple opportunities to learn about the whole GIS system as well as skills outside of just GIS such as public speaking or how to plan projects instead of just jumping straight into it.
What's your background?
I grew up in Havelock North in Hawkes Bay. I went to High school at Hastings Boys for 5 years which I absolutely loved and think was the best high school for me. It was a very sports-heavy school which I loved as I played cricket and football for the 1st 11 for both and was captain. I then decided to move down to Wellington after high school and continue my studies at Victoria University, where I studied a Bachelor of Science majoring in Physical Geography and minoring in Geology. This is where I picked up a couple of GIS papers and really enjoyed these papers and thought I’d like to pursue a career out of this. I applied for Eagle Technology at the end of my studies in 2022 and started a summer internship at the beginning of January which then went on for a month until I started the graduate program in February. I remember in my High School days in a geography class we had a speaker come in who was an old boy of the school who had got a job in GIS, and he was doing a presentation on some projects he has worked on and how he used GIS and what it was. This was my first time hearing about GIS, and I thought it was really cool so when I heard about a paper at the University on GIS, I was excited to take it from this past experience.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes, there are a lot of people at Eagle Technology with different degrees, at most universities, you can’t major in GIS so there’s a wide variety of different university degrees. The first six weeks of starting at Eagle you will go on the Geospatial Accelerated Learning Programme - Express which will upskill you on everything you need to know about GIS to get started. I think the main traits to have, are you just need to be curious and want to continue to learn every day, as well as being open-minded as there’s not one way to do a task in GIS there are often multiple different ways.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
My favourite thing about GIS is the problem-solving aspect of the job. I enjoy unravelling spatial puzzles, analysing data to uncover insights, and the satisfaction you finding the solution to solve the problem.
What are the limitations of your job?
A limitation for some people is that in the technical solutions team, there can be a bit of travel involved as there are Regional User Conferences that you have to attend all around the country as well as a National User conference which goes for multiple days.
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