Geospatial is one of those sectors that touches almost everything and yet remains strangely hard to see. It’s in the app that reroutes us around roadworks, the model tracking coastal erosion, and the dataset that helps emergency services reach the right address, but ask most school leavers, graduates, or career changers in Scotland what a “geospatial career” looks like, and many won’t know. 

Our findings undertaken in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and AGI Scotland over the last 5 years has found the barrier usually isn’t a lack of jobs, the sector is growing briskly, but a lack of visibility and education/training. Geospatial roles are spread across the public sector and a wide range of industries, from engineering, infrastructure and utilities to technology, space, environment, energy and professional services, as well as specialist geospatial businesses and start-ups. They also sit under inconsistent job titles, with a significant gap at entry level and roles spanning graduate trainees, line management, mid-management and senior management. For someone new to the field, that combination can be confusing.

Geospatial UK provides access to current, relevant geospatial vacancies by skill, location, and postcode, alongside role profiles that spell out what jobs like GIS Technician or Hydrographic Surveyor actually involve and pay. It also links directly to routes in, from college courses like Fife College’s Geospatial Foundation Skills programme through to university degrees across the UK and Ireland. 

Whether you’re looking for your first role, considering a career change or thinking about your next step, the Geospatial UK careers page is a useful way to explore the breadth of opportunities geospatial has to offer.  Geospatial UK careers page