A friend of mine pung me yesterday, asking me what I thought about the recent layoffs and whether collapse is too strong of a term for EO start-ups and established players.
That's a whole other post, which isn't fully formed in my head - but it did help me connect dots.
I teach Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis at Northeastern. When I started teaching back in 2018, my classes were 8 to 12. At the beginning of the pandemic, it dropped from 8 to like 4.
Since 2022, I've had a couple of classes canceled because not enough students were enrolling. I thought it was just me, but then communications from the department indicated it was across the board.
We didn't offer classes this past quarter.
This raises a number of questions
Are students bypassing Geospatial, and just "doing" Data Science? (Side note: Like I predicted back in '13)
Are there just more vectors to learn Geospatial skills - there are, and I know classes are pricey. So, are folks just being thrifty because of the economy? Or are education benefits getting cut?
We speak of the "golden age of geospatial," well some do, or are we in a decline?
As a community, it might be time for us to take a look at ourselves and figure out what's going on, and how we can reposition Geospatial to actually be the 1.37 trillion dollar industry folks think we're going to become. But, this is going to require us to take off our rose-colored glasses and love of the data, maps, and processes and take an honest and transparent look at who we are, where we need to go, and what it will take to get there.
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2dIs there any remote job opportunities for digital marketer?