In regards to remote sensing…
You would be hard pressed to find many universities who teach the remote sensing. Not to mention, 0 community colleges. Though photogrammetry is a doable thing to pick up, the remote sensing skills that I find people hiring for (i.e. usually some sort of classification procedure using ERDAS, Definiens, or ENVI) are not easy to learn in many colleges. The software is simply too expensive for general student labs to afford. Definiens licenses can run 7500-10,000….ENVI isn’t much better (4,000-6,000). Even with educational discounts (I know one person who got a single use license for Definiens for 2,000) that’s pretty expensive stuff there.

Though I believe ESRI has done an admirable job integrating their products into community colleges and even the K-12 system. They’ve put in the legwork to make their product user-friendly (not something I can say for all software packages) and relatively affordable.

Ultimately, unless you had the good fortune to attend a university with a lot of money and prestige, you are not going to learn RS just anywhere.

Another thing I wanted to mention….as a young GIS/RS tech, I’m troubled by the attitudes of some of the employers I meet today. I’ve been interviewed at firms who are new to GIS (primarily in the solar and wind industry). Some of these firms had a laundry list as long as yours, and were requesting that work be cranked out for a pretty low fee (if there was a fee). There were also an abnormally large amount of requests for me to start work as an ‘trial intern’ and/or design them a highly functional WebGIS in the matter of weeks.

I’d blame this attitude on the economy, but I have other evidence to that begs note. Recently, I have lost count of how many grad school acquaintances and non-profits have requested me to perform some GIS/RS task at the drop of a hat (for free). Though I’m happy to help these friends, it is a little disconcerting that they believe GIS works ‘something like google maps’ and you can just type addresses in and get whatever information that you want with a twinkle of your eye. The time it takes to accurately geocode their site data, and find/create the shapefiles files that provide the information they want….well, they think it should be done in the matter of minutes (not hours/days).

It seems that news of the usefulness and many-applications of GIS has reached these industries…however, they don’t seem to have a clue how to best utilize this technology. They also have a rather flippant attitude about salary and how long (and costly) it is to develop these particular skill sets. I feel kindof tired being paid 1/2 of what your average IT tech is making (though I have a master’s and a very similar skill set).

Much like our problem with farmers today (which is an aging, highly-litigious, and impoverished profession, with the average farmer being over 55 and approaching 60, and the proportion of principal farm operators younger than 35 dropping from 15.9 percent in 1982 to 5.8 percent in 2002) if we don’t make the profession worthwhile to young employees, they aren’t going to study it in college, and they are not going to enter the field. Something needs to be done to somehow impress upon our new markets that GIS is an expansive technology, and it’s students are not mere “google maps junkies”.

What is the best programming language to learn, for someone (like me) who doesnt know how to program and is one thing missing for my CV?