GIS Officer Duties & Responsibilities

The role and function of a GIS Officer includes the following duties and responsibilities:

  • Use a range of GPS tools in the field to capture the location of 'assets' such as bridges, street lights, road barriers and flood defences
  • Undertake desk-based data capture (digitising) to convert paper maps to GIS datasets to, for example, record the location of telecoms cables or water pipelines from original maps.
  • Create and maintain the structures necessary for GIS data storage
  • Develop tools for loading/transferring GIS data between different systems
  • Manipulate, analyse and present geographical information by creating programs to convert GIS information from one format to another
  • Develop internet apps to present GIS data and tools on corporate websites
  • Use tools to join together different GIS datasets and create new information or investigate patterns, e.g. estimating the number of people potentially affected by flooding, using population growth figures and planning information to estimate increasing/decreasing demand for school capacity or calculating the number of potential customers for a new supermarket and predicting buying patterns based on socio-economic factors.

Note that this is not an exhaustive list of GIS Officer duties and responsibilities. Job functions for specific GIS Officer roles may vary, depending on the industry and type of employer.