5 ways to get a job in the “geo-industry”

Studying geosciences, geography or geology and all related disciplines commonly ends in the question of appropriate job position. Personally I felt very lucky about my former studies in geography, but it was also very complex to understand the Earth system. This led to my conclusion that defining and finding a job could be difficult. In conclusion to friends, who studied law, medicine ore teaching profession, my way into employment wasn’t so clearly predefined in a certain way. Even more: I saw this fact as advantage and big luck to be forced to creativity concerning job definition.

Especially for Geoscientists the first university degree isn’t in direct connection with an occupation in contrast to other further education. My friends at the University who studied medicine or law were always relaxed when asked the question “What do yo do after studying?”. Personally I valued it as an advantage not be restricted to a very narrow field of occupation. Still I needed to think about this question a bit harder. As I see it quite often that the way towards an occupation is a bit rough for us geo-people I would like to state 5 tips to find a proper occupation.

Digital-Geography Job Page

To identify open job opportunities I recommend to use the web instead of the good old newspaper. As we saw the strong need for a spatial job portal, we created the digital-geography.com job page. We present there a world map of where you can filter with keywords (use the magnifying glass on the right) in 53 countries of the world. Using the list-symbol below the magnifying glass the results are listed for the nice tabular overview. We think that the map view is great to find the right position especially if you’re already settled or the next city is farer then thought but still easy to reach (aka. 30 miles through a metropolitan area are much harder than 30 miles in a rural environment).

To use this in a convenient way you need to disable AdBlocker as the map shows indeed job opportunities.

Job Platforms

Of course there are many platforms out there to search for a job on. A bit more specialized pages are:
EGU Job page
EFG
Geological Society
Intergeo
GIS Job Clearinghouse
Oil and Gas
Earthworks-jobs.com
Geology.com
Geosociety
Jobs4Mining

Additionally there are unspecified portals as well:

Stepstone
Monster
Indeed

(If you know more, please drop a comment and I’ll add them).

Most of my friends are not working in a Geo-company so it is shown that there is not the narrow field of occupation but more a job landscape for us! Read the position descriptions also it might not be the one fulfilling all your desires. Maybe there is not the perfect job for a person at all…

Social Media

To be connected with others is the most important thing to remember! In 2012 we founded the most relevant German speaking Facebook group of geoscientists with over 8500 members. We discuss questions and problems, share ideas and also current open positions. Furthermore you should use twitter to follow big and small companies and influencers of your field of work (my favorite hashtag: #gistribe):

Colleagues

Stay in contact with your fellow students and inform each other about internships and current opportunities. Most often an open position is discussed with the current employees (“Do you know someone?”). The usage of job hunters or placing the open position at a job page is often only the second option to an employer. Besides the already mentioned social media channels there is also the quite new “Meetup”: people of different industries and with different intentions meet periodically to share knowledge, ideas, future and past projects. In the context of cartography I am a big fan of maptime but there are thousands of Meetups worldwide

Self Employment

If you have the idea, don’t hesitate and make the next step: self employment. To start your own company there is not necessarily the need of “big money”. In fact it can be started quite easy. Of course it’s good to have a proper plan and organize everything upfront (health insurance, social security, taxes…) and often the universities offer some founder programs. Experiences from an employment might be of advantage as well to make a good start in your own company.

End

I would like to initiate the field of job search for geoscientists on our blog and would be happy, if you could share your experiences with us using the comment section below.