LEARNERSHIP SUCCESS
GIS intern appointed as GIS technician
Jarod Naidoo | GIS Technician
Unemployment in South Africa creates a strain on our economy and communities. The unemployment rate for youth in South Africa is significantly higher than the rest of South Africa’s population. As such Esri South Africa has implemented various initiatives to assist with upskilling unemployed youth. Jarod Naidoo applied for the free Unemployed Youth Training at Esri South Africa. The initiative targets unemployed youth in the 18 to 30 year age category.
Jarod signed up for the week-long GIS training course that covers the basic theoretical and practical concepts of GIS including spatial data structures, data sources and transfer methods, projections, coordinate systems as well as fundamental spatial analysis technique. Jarod was then interviewed by management and was offered an internship at Esri South Africa.
He was placed in the professional services department which consists of the largest pool of GIS expertise in Southern Africa. Working with the professional services team, Jarod was mentored and trained to stay abreast of the latest GIS technology developments and applications, which are used by the top companies throughout Southern Africa. Jarod found his forte in providing mobile solution packages for clients and showed interest in programming viz. python, JavaScript, Arcade, CSS, HTML. In addition, he also completed some of Esri’s free e-online training to expand his knowledge and understanding of Esri technology.
After a successful year and a half as a GIS intern at Esri South Africa, he received a job offer from Golder Africa as a GIS technician. Golder Africa, is a consulting company operating within the Mining and Environmental discipline which consists of a small GIS team that deals mostly with requests from specialists. These requests are widely varied in content and complexity, ranging from drawing up a simple locality map to doing advanced geoprocessing analysis and everything in between.
“A huge benefit from working at Esri South Africa previously is having access to a community of GIS professionals to advise on best practices and latest trends in the Mining & Environmental discipline.
I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity provided by Esri South Africa, you have been key to my current success! My advice to the next generation of interns would be “Find your niche…!”. Simple, yet elegant, but most importantly it is true and reliable. Accompanied by hard work and the connections you make; your path will be set up for SUCCESS!” – Jarod Naidoo