Quang T. answered • 07/30/19
GIS professional and Engineer with 5+ years of experience
Generally speaking there are two main responsibilities: data processing and digitizing.
Most entry-level GIS jobs have you working with digitization. Digitization is basically where you're doing point and click, and creating a map. Pretty simple and repetitive. Most GIS Analyst jobs, the next level from entry, and beyond have your main responsibilities dealing with data analysis. Generally this is data collection, importing/ingesting data so that its compatible with your organizations database, and converting that data so it can be used on a GIS platform. Digitizing plays a relatively small role in your job duties.
I'll use a recent job I did for a client as an example. Overall it took me 2 hours to create a map for my client. About 30 minutes was spent finding the relevant data to import into the GIS platform. The next hour was formatting the data in a way which it would work on the GIS platform (e.g. removing unnecessary data, fixing compatibility issues, etc.). The last 30 minutes was actually making the map on ArcMap and 15 minutes of it was just waiting for the program to work.
