Are You a Professional?

August 25, 2010 By: Eric Gakstatter

This is a question that has been tossed around a lot in the past few years. I hear it both from GIS folks and from land surveyors. Are you a professional? What constitutes a professional? Do you refer to yourself as a professional? If so, why?

Is a paid athlete a professional?
Is a journalist a professional?
Is a pilot a professional?
Is a house painter a professional?
Is an engineer a professional?
Is a land surveyor a professional?
Is a GIS architect a professional?
Is an architect who designed your house a professional?

Think about how you would answer each of those questions.

To me, a professional athlete is one who is a football/basketball/baseball/hockey/golf player that is paid to perform in that capacity and that is his/her primary source of income (versus a hobby). I feel the same with a journalist, and a pilot. However, if you call a survey crew chief who does not have a land-surveying license but who earns his living as a crew chief a “professional,” you’ll see a bunch of people get bent out of shape.

I read an interesting blog post from Gretchen Peterson this week. Gretchen makes her living in GIS. Her blog touched on "professionalism" and the definition of such. Following is her blog post:

Do you think that GIS professionals are woefully under-educated in the realm of projections and scale? And if so, do you believe this has important implications to cartography? During a discussion about this on Twitter recently it came to light that we need to distinguish between GIS users and GIS professionals. GIS users — those who, for example, use Google Earth to plot their vacation spots — may not know about projection and scale.

When we speak about GIS professionals, though, we need to expect that our colleagues are educated, well-informed individuals who have this basic knowledge under their belts either through their schooling or their own personal education on the job. Anything less is to be negative to a point of downgrading our entire profession as a bunch of idiots who don’t know the basics of our field. Let’s not be that way. Let’s assume that others are just as well-informed as we are, okay? Let’s not go around smacking others with our elitism.

At any rate, how much does scale and projection have to do with cartography? If we are talking about cartographic design, then these matter very little. If we are talking about cartographic truth, then these could have a fundamental impact on the end-result of a map making effort. Today when I was talking with the personnel at the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University, my own feelings were mirrored when I was told that the problem in map design is not the lack of fundamental understanding of projections and scale.

The major problem is that very intelligent analysts, scientists, programmers, are producing data and then trying to communicate their data via very badly designed maps. It isn’t that they misrepresent information on their maps. No, it is these problems that are most at the forefront:

Too much clutter
Lack of organization
Poor color choice
Attributes that should pop are in the background and attributes that should be subdued are in the foreground
Labels incorrectly placed or not placed with enough care
Lack of a central focus

These are the things I am most interested in teaching. These are design aspects that many GIS professionals are lacking and which, when learned, can enable our map products to take on that level of design excellence that leads to vastly improved communication.

It seems to me the common denominator in being considered a “professional,” at least in my mind, is communication. Before you tee off on me about how education, experience, training, etc. are paramount, read on.

If I saw a pilot wearing a tattered uniform, disheveled hair, and carrying a ragged briefcase, it wouldn't matter how many flight hours he/she had, I’d think he/she was unprofessional. If a football player was arrested at a nightclub after playing in the Superbowl that day, I’d think he/she was unprofessional.

On the other hand, if a house painter conducted themselves in a punctual, respectful and efficient manner, I’d consider them a professional. If I thought a journalist clearly reported the facts with a balanced view and appeared to apply a fair amount of due diligence, I’d consider her a professional.

Many times, I hear licensure (land surveying and engineering) being a deciding factor as to whether a person is considered a professional. The fact is that you have to be licensed to perform certain tasks (in the U.S., it's decided by each state legislature) and there's even language in each state statute using the term "professional." Even more confusing are engineers. Civil engineers have to be licensed to practice certain tasks; software engineers do not.

At the end of the day, my thought is that communication, believe it or not, is the trump card and determines whether you are considered a “professional” or not. You can earn a license to practice specific tasks, but you can still behave/perform/communicate like an idiot and be considered “unprofessional” by a majority of your peers.

However, my definition of communication may be different than yours. Of course, the obvious definition of communication is how you speak, write, read, and listen. But, like Gretchen blogs, it’s also about how you perform and how your product communicates to its audience. You can be the sharpest engineer whose calculations are uber-precise and earn an A+ grade, but your performance will be severely diluted if you can only communicate your results at a grade C level. Ultimately, you are only as competent as what you can communicate to your audience.

I think about being a "professional" not as a rank you earn and retain indefinitely, but rather an ongoing barometer about how you communicate to your audience. There's a lot of value in the statement "you're only as good as your last task."

So, I wonder why some people are hung up on being considered or referred to as a "professional"? To me, it's sort of like people who ask to be "respected." If you want respect, you communicate in a way that earns respect from your peers. Likewise, being a professional is something you really can't ask for, but is something that earned by your performance.

I wouldn't swear by it, but I don’t think I've ever have referred to myself as a professional. It's never entered my mind to do so. This makes me think about why a person would do so. To justify his/her salary/fees? Status? Earn a potential customer's business?

Thanks, and see you next week.

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