Like in the past academic year, IDOM visited us for an industry talk centred around career development aspects in the GIS sector. It was a pleasure for GEOTEC to host an industry talk on Feb 8^th, 2019 delivered by Raul Martínez and Jelena Stosic. Our Erasmus Mundus Master students were the main audience.

The talk was entitled “Our experience in the geospatial business”. Jelena opened the talk to briefly introduce IDOM, facts and numbers, offices worldwide, etc. In IDOM, GIS is transversal to most of the strategic areas of the company (transport, utility and energy, industry and e-government).

Next, Raul explained a list of selected projects, either past or on-going, developed by IDOM. Smart Transport Information System Abu Dhabi (DARB, https://www.darb.ae/darbweb/map-viewer.html) is an interactive map-based web application that provides mobility-related functions such as a multi-modal journey planner, carpooling and user-generated reports of new traffic incidents. It is a good example of an operational GIS project as a way to integrate distinct data providers and data sources around the common denominator of location.

Raul continued with an ongoing project that is being developed in North America, resolving around train carrier management and tracking logistic in US, Canada and Mexico. The project is a remarkable example in terms of integration of diverse data providers in almost real-time using a web-based dashboard to watch how the goods move.

Raul finished with some tips on career development opportunities for GIS professionals, from the perspective of IDOM – a big player in industry. The trend now is that everything is being merged, so the value is in mixing systems and disciplines (aka business intelligence). Regarding the analytical part, the trend is in (geo) cloud platforms such as AGOL, Carto and Mapbox. Data science tools are also gaining importance like Jupyter notebooks with spatial intelligence on top of big data architecture. On a final note, Raul projects that retail and finance are becoming new business areas beyond of the classical ones such as logistics, management, and mobility.

An open call for future GIS professional: IDOM seeks professionals and engineers with hard skills (technical knowledge) but especially with soft skills (empathy, problem solving, teamwork, communication skills)

The presentation was followed by a vivid discussion between the two speakers and all students, who were really interested in developing their TFM thesis in industry settings.