GEOSCIENCE EMPLOYER PERCEPTIONS OF ENTRY-LEVEL EMPLOYEES’ SPATIAL THINKING SKILLS (Invited Presentation)

Geoscience departments face the challenge of equipping students with the necessary skills and competencies to succeed in an ever-evolving workforce. Spatial thinking is one skill considered critical for success in the geosciences and other STEM disciplines. Given the diverse range of career paths available to graduates with geoscience-related degrees, understanding employer expectations of students’ spatial thinking skills can help geoscience programs prepare their students for successful entry into the workforce. Our work aims to identify how geoscience employers prioritize spatial thinking and other workforce skills. Using online job advertisements, we rank-ordered numerous skills requested by geoscience employers. Employers seek individuals with the ability to conduct various types of fieldwork; ability to plan work, collect, process, and interpret data; and communicate effectively. Spatial thinking skills were rarely requested by employers for positions other than GIS or mapping related occupations. However, preliminary data from interviews of employers who hire recent geoscience graduates into entry-level positions suggest most geoscience employers expect geoscience students to have strong spatial thinking skills as a part of their geoscience degree. Our results provide insight into what employers expect from recent graduates with a geoscience degree. Programs can use these data to make students aware of employer expectations and help students communicate to employers that they possess the necessary skills, such as spatial thinking, to be successful in the workforce.