Abstract
Abstract. This paper addresses the issue of manpower planning in meeting the needs of national and international economies for trained geomatics professionals. Estimated statistics for the numbers of such personnel, and experience in assessing recruitment into the profession reveal considerable skills gaps, particularly in the mature economies of the developed world. In general, centralised manpower planning has little official role in western economies. However, informal surveys of shortfalls in supply of qualified graduates in many fields, including geomatics, are undertaken by professional organisations, educational establishments and consultancies. This paper examines examples of such manpower surveys and considers whether more effective manpower planning would ensure a more efficient geomatics industry in a nation, and what the nature of such an exercise should be.
Highlights
The disciplines of geomatics are in the middle of a revolution in scope, demands, and influence
Medical training is a burden on state finances, even in the most liberal of economies (it uses up institutional resources which cannot be retrieved; its length takes resourceful and intelligent workers out of the national economy for a significant time period; its volume and quality have a direct impact on the health of the citizen), and it is no surprise that manpower planning is practiced in such a field
Quite often a government can abrogate any responsibility for the process of manpower planning and an individual company can take the view that its own internal manpower planning is good commercial practice
Summary
The disciplines of geomatics are in the middle of a revolution in scope, demands, and influence. There are many alternatives to each step in the flow-line, and the flow-line is no longer linear – it can branch, backtrack, circumvent; steps can be followed in very different ways using different procedures, and can sometimes be skipped entirely This variety, this availability of data, tools, procedures, and this freedom to select and apply them, is what characterises the work of cartographers and must be reflected in the contemporary education of cartographers. Such education and awareness-raising needs to be extended to those engaged in manpower planning and management of the labour market. The identification of ‘critical and priority skills’ is a typical outcome of such studies, and whilst such outcomes interact with educational syllabus development, they importantly can feed in to national manpower planning
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