How To Become A Geospatial Engineer: What It Is and Career Path

What is a geospatial engineer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

3 min read

For most people, folding maps is difficult enough, let alone interpreting them or even creating them. But geospatial engineers are not most people. They can take geographic data collected from GIS or GPS technologies and not only turn it into maps but interpret that knowledge to fulfill their employer's specific goal.

A geospatial engineer can work in many different fields, wherever people need to know about the lay of the land. They can work for construction or civil engineering firms and help pick out potential sites for building projects. They can also work on disaster relief operations and help plan rescues. Many geospatial engineers even work for the army and help prepare top-secret military operations.

No matter where they work, geospatial engineers need to know a lot about geography, including how to use advanced software like GIS mapping. While some geospatial engineers attend a university to learn these skills, just as many learn them on the job.

ScoreGeospatial EngineerUS Average

Salary

7.2

Avg. Salary $92,650

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

4.0

Growth rate 21%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

4.1

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.17%

Asian 26.16%

Black or African American 4.49%

Hispanic or Latino 8.24%

Unknown 4.82%

White 56.12%

Gender

female 17.89%

male 82.11%

Age - 38

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 38

Stress level

4.0

Stress level is moderate

7.1 - high

Complexity level

7.9

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

6.6

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a geospatial engineer

Explore geospatial engineer education requirements

Most common geospatial engineer degrees

Bachelor's

53.0 %

Associate

23.0 %

High School Diploma

11.5 %

Start to develop specific geospatial engineer skills

Skills	Percentages
Disaster Relief	15.86%
Intelligence Data	15.37%
Digital Data	12.73%
Military Operations	10.04%
Combat	9.66%

Complete relevant geospatial engineer training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 3-6 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New geospatial engineers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a geospatial engineer based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real geospatial engineer resumes.

Research geospatial engineer duties and responsibilities

Manage developing products, presentation and analysis supporting events, personnel and critical missions using ESRI software i.e.
Perform responsibilities of collecting and understanding business requirements for an internal TCS project to automate the report generations.
Involve in the design and development of presentation part using HTML and CSS.
Used jQuery and AJAX for service call on pages to interact with the server for information.

Prepare your geospatial engineer resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your geospatial engineer resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a geospatial engineer resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable geospatial engineer resume templates

Build a professional geospatial engineer resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 10+ resume templates to create your geospatial engineer resume.