Researcher and consultant in the domains of geospatial data, data infrastructures and digital transformation

EO4GEO - Towards an innovative strategy for skills development and capacity building in the space and geo-information sector to support Copernicus user uptake (2018-2022)

This is a summary of the paper ‘Gruijthuijsen, W., Pontes, S., Vancauwenberghe, G., Vandenbroucke, D., & Olijslagers, M. (2019). Understanding skill needs in the EO/GI sector: A job advertisements analysis. 22nd AGILE Conference on Geo-information Science, Limassol, Cyprus, 17-20 June 2019’. The paper was prepared in the context of the Erasmus+ Sector Skills Alliance project ‘EO4GEO - Towards an innovative strategy for skills development and capacity building in the space and geo-information sector to support Copernicus user uptake (2018-2022)’.

To increase the strategic importance of the Earth Observation and Geo-information (EO/GI) sector and strengthen the uptake of geospatial data by both the public and private sector, a mismatch between supply of education and training and the demand for skills and knowledge should be prevented. Several European policy initiatives are supporting skill assessment and intelligence to get more insight in the skills and occupational profiles that are important for the European EO/GI sector. This paper contributed to this goal through an application of a job advertisements analysis as an innovative approach for the sector to assess the EO/GI job market in Europe. The study seeked to address the following research question: What are the key skills and profiles currently required by the European EO/GI job market?

In order to answer this question, a job advertisements analysis was performed of EO/GI related job advertisements published on LinkedIn. Using a set of search strings based on the European multilingual classification of Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) 118 EO/GI-related job advertisements found on LinkedIn were collected and further analysed. The majority of these were jobs in the private sector (77%). The job advertisements analysis also contained data on jobs in the academic sector (12%), public sector (9%) and non-profit sector (2%).


The investigation of job advertisements in the EO/GI domain helped in identifying main job profiles currently needed in the EO/GI domain. Based on existing EO/GI related job advertisements, seven main profiles were detected (see Table 1): Remote sensing specialists (24% of the investigated job advertisements), GIS Developer (17%), GIS –Data–Specialist (15%), GIS Consultant (14%), GIS Technician (12%), GIS Analyst (10%) and Cartographer (9%).

The findings from the job advertisement analysis showed that:

  • Cartography and cartographer still is a relevant domain/occupation, but its importance in the current EO/GI job market is relatively limited (less than 10% of all job advertisements);
  • Remote sensing (specialist) constitutes the biggest part of the detected job advertisements, with around one fourth of the detected job advertisements;
  • The remaining job advertisements all deal with a GIS related job or occupation, of which the most often needed are GIS Developers, GIS Specialist and GIS Consultants. This can be seen as an indication of the need to make a clear distinction between different GIS profiles, and move away from the general profile of ‘GIS Specialist’ as used in ESCO.

The job advertisement analysis also investigated the need for particular skills in the EO/GI sector based on the recently published job advertisements. All skills included in the vacancies were collected and categorized based on seven predefined skill sets. For each job vacancy, we identified the two most evident skill sets. It should be noticed that some vacancies only included skills related to one particular skill sets. Of the seven skill sets we used, two were rarely found in the job advertisements in the analysis (see Table 2). The skill set ‘Computing Resources and Platforms’ was hardly recognized in existing job advertisements, with 1% of the detected skills that were related to this skill set. Also the skill set ‘Institutional, Organizational and Society’ was little included in the job advertisements (3,1%).

While the skill sets ‘Visualization and Cartography’ (12,0%) and ‘Data Capture’ (9,4%) clearly were more relevant in current EO/GI job advertisements, especially the three other skill sets were very present in these vacancies. With almost 27% of the mentioned skills, the skill set ‘Programming and developing’ was the most prominent skill set in the recent vacancies for the EO/GI job market. Also ‘Analytical Methods’ (26%) and the newly defined skill set ‘Pre-processing and modelling of data’ (22%) were highly relevant, according to the job advertisements.

The analysis also demonstrated the different skills needs across the three main occupational profiles, when linking the skill sets to the different profiles. Skills required by the profile of ‘GIS Specialist’ were mainly related to ‘Programming and Developing’, ‘Analytical Methods’ and ‘Pre-processing and Modelling of Data’. The most relevant skill set for the profile of ‘Remote Sensing Technicians’ was ‘Analytical Methods’, in combination with especially ‘Programming and Developing’. Cartographers hardly needed skills related to ‘Programming and Developing’, but had one dominant skill set: Visualization and Cartography.