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My name is Kevin Watson and I’m a Geomatics Analytical Technician for the Ministry of Natural Resources.
I use geographic information to create products such as maps and applications for the Internet or stand-alone applications.
The key tasks and responsibilities to my job are providing support to a planning team within the province. My job calls on me to be creative,
when we’re producing products for clients, we have to make them look good and make them presentable for the public eye and for presentations.
When we’re producing a map we might as part of the Ontario living legacy project,
I’ll work on the data behind the map, give that data to a cartographer and that cartographer will produce a piece of a map.
My day consists of, when I come into work in the morning, I’ll check messages on my phone, and check my email for requests that are coming from the client that I’m working for,
and usually that involves me calling back and finding out more about their request and then the day will carry on with me trying to fill those requests.
As far as statistics is concerned,
a lot of the times my client will come to me and ask me can you tell me how many hectares of land are on the great lake heritage coast geographic area,
I’ll send them back numbers, percentages.
The work environment is very busy, it’s quite loud, there’s always something going on around us.
You interact with people every day, which is great, you’re producing very visual products, which makes your job rewarding.
One of the major disadvantages is we depend on a network, which is the entire province, and that can get overloaded, or sometimes the system goes down.
Ninety percent of the time you’re working with the data, which can become tedious and repetitive, ten percent of the time you are creating the final product.
It’s important in this field to be able to sit in front of a computer for seven or eight hours a day.
Usually the hours a week are eight hours a day, five days a week.
As far as education and training, I went to the University of Waterloo to do my undergrad in geography,
and from there I took a graduate course at Sir Sanford Fleming College
called the geographic information systems application specialist program.
I do understand that Sir Sanford Fleming is coming out with a new program called the GIS Technician
which is a two-year program straight out of high school which can then go and carry on to the application specialist program which I took.
As far as income ranges in a geomatics career, most people are thirty to sixty thousand,
and if you achieve five to ten years of experience, some move above sixty, and sometimes into the eighties and nineties; it can become quite prosperous.
It makes you feel good to protect the environment, you know, you always hear on the news, dismal things about the environment,
and sooner or later we’re going to have to do something about that.
I think I’ll feel a great amount of pride to see elements of our work out there, protecting the land, protecting natural and cultural heritage.