GIS Training and Why It Matters for Your Business

Geographic information systems (GIS) are quickly becoming a powerful tool for many essential industries such as infrastructure, water, telecommunications and environmental applications. While you may not think about it beyond your Google Maps app, a GIS application is more significant than a regular mapping system.

GIS training will ensure your business stays at the forefront of your industry, essentially future-proofing your business. Imagine always being able to respond quickly and efficiently to needs, updates and concerns while mitigating issues and staying in compliance to avoid regulatory fines. 

Training your team to optimise GIS solutions for your business ensures that they know how to use them correctly, and in the long run, it will also save time and money. As GIS continually expands its capabilities and applications, GIS training and workshops that help keep your team up to date will significantly benefit your business.

Reasons Why GIS Training Is Essential

Think about when you buy a new phone or tablet, with its capabilities to monitor weather, roads, events and research places to go or see.  If you only learned to make phone calls but did not use the many other possible applications, you would not be making optimal use of your device. Imagine this on a much larger scale and think about how training to use all available tools and technology can help your business.

1. Improves Employee Efficiency and Productivity

Training ensures your employees will use GIS to its optimum ability.  Lack of proper training leads to employees taking extended amounts of time to fix something, more trial and error to find solutions and more time needed for tasks to be completed.

GIS training improves the efficiency of your employees and will enable them to complete a variety of tasks, finish their work faster and simplify the entire process. If you are thinking about the cost of training, you will find that your employees are also more productive, helping to save the company money in the long run and making a good return on your investment.

2. Improvement Of Staff Knowledge

Following a GIS training, your employees will improve their knowledge and add to their collective skill set. With their new skills, your employees will be able to work quickly and complete more projects.

Managers and supervisors will have more time as they won’t be micromanaging the staff, constantly answering questions and explaining details of the project to several individuals in different meetings as everyone will understand how to navigate the GIS program.

Once your employees know how to operate the GIS program, fewer errors will save time and money as you will no longer have to have staff or resources to correct the mistakes. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there will never be errors, but your team will know how to fix them quickly and mitigate liability issues when mistakes happen. 

3. Opportunity For Growth And Development

As more of your employees gain knowledge, you will have an overall larger pool of expertise to support your business which helps to support innovation and expansion in your company. Utility and infrastructure companies, environmental agencies, and other organisations benefit from transforming their business using GIS.

When a company invests in training for its employees, they feel appreciated, and they are also better able to identify issues and inefficiencies in projects, systems and procedures. Understanding the application and use of GIS will allow the company to take on more projects, monitor existing projects better and expand into new opportunities.

What Should GIS Training Include?

When you decide to invest in a GIS training course, there are some fundamentals that you want your employees to learn.

• Uses Of GIS. Start with a course that offers basic information and principles of GIS if your team is just beginning to learn about it. GIS has various applications, and after learning the basic skills, there are field-specific training workshops.
• What is the difference between geospatial and GIS? Geospatial refers to technology and applications related to geographic data, and GIS refers to the use of geographic data to create derivative maps and spatial analysis.

•  Different types of GIS data. The first type is raster data, and it is cell-based data, like aerial imagery, land use, tree height, or elevation, which connects data to a location on a map. The second type is vector data, and it consists of points, lines, or polygons with an attribute.
• The programming language. Python is the programming language used for GIS.
• Cartography. Having a basic understanding of how to read and understand maps and GPS training, how maps are made, the principles of map-making and how to apply them in different situations.
• Database Management. The key to GIS training is to understand how to read and manage data correctly, what types of data are available, what errors are common and navigate the geodatabases.
• Continual training and support. While an introductory course is a great start, GIS solutions are continually advancing capabilities making it a wise business decision to ensure ongoing training and support is a part of your team’s development program. As GIS continues to grow, it is essential to keep up with current GIS updates and how to optimise the tools properly.

GIS and Future-Proofing Your Business

As experts in GIS and geospatial technology, we recognise the need to stay current on GIS and keep employees in your business up to date on their training. At MGISS, we offer the training to advance your team’s knowledge and expertise.
Whether your organisation is an environmental agency, infrastructure or utility company, we have the expertise to support you and your business. Contact us today to learn how we can support your business and find a GIS solution for you!

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