Workforce Development Summit

Pre Conference // MONDAY - 13 JANUARY

The 2025 GeoBuiz Summit brings together leaders from across the private sector along with other leaders in workforce development. The goal: to engage participants in a critically important dialog designed to gather insights and recommendations to better prepare our current and future professional workforce to meet industry needs of today and into the future.

Building on the recommendations and outcomes from the workforce readiness sessions at the public sector-focused GeoGov Summit, the GeoBuiz Workforce Development Summit will identify, discuss, and promote industry perspectives and solutions to address capability and capacity development challenges such as:

Conveying industry skill requirements to institutions of learning / training.

Encouraging responsiveness of institutions of learning / training in preparing and executing programs that prepare new entrants / upskill current workforce participants to meet industry timelines and other pressures.

Understanding the level of visibility into the breadth of offerings available to the workforce to build needed skills and competencies.

Addressing the growing nationwide shortage of specific geospatial expertise, including the following critical professions:

Geodesy is a profession that ensures that the nation’s geodetic framework in which all geospatial information relies. This profession must be maintained and modernized to meet the growing demands for higher accuracy and precision to support increasingly automated operations such as autonomous vehicles.
Surveying is a critically important profession that ensures not only the health of cadastral systems and the relationship between physical and digital systems, but also the confidence and viability of high-precision, high-accuracy industry applications of geospatial data. The current workforce is “aging out” rapidly in the U.S. and in other countries.

Defining the optimum workplace of the future necessary to recruit and retain skilled employees possessing varied backgrounds, different learning styles, and increasing preference for remote / hybrid workplace arrangements.

While significant headwinds exist, there is movement by industry and institutions of learning to develop approaches and solutions that address these challenges. The Workforce Development Summit will highlight these approaches and solutions by including discussions on areas of success that merit expansion, such as:

Boosting geography and geospatial education in K-12.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) Geospatial programs that create employment pathways for high school students and those interested in career advancement / change.

Emergence of short-duration programs informed by industry to rapidly upskill workforce, with emphasis on developing competencies rather than credentials.

Speakers

Tyler Svitak

Executive Director
Colorado Smart Cities Alliance

Narendra Babu Vattem

CEO
iSpatial Techno Solutions (IST) Inc

William Morgenstern

Head, Global Geospatial Collection Operations
Tech Mahindra

Chris Surbey

Consultant
Spatial Strategies

Dave Dionne

Chief Strategy Officer
Merkator