Name: GIS Has Grown Up. Our Roles Haven’t.
Start: 2026-05-26T15:15:00-0400
End: 2026-05-26T15:45:00-0400

Tuesday May 26, 2026 3:15pm - 3:45pm EDT

Understanding roles in GIS becomes more complex each year. The field has expanded beyond traditional responsibilities into a wide range of users, specialized skills, and subjects. Yet we still use “GIS Specialist” to describe roles requiring anywhere from five to thirty years of experience.
This mismatch creates real challenges. Titles and expectations are often unclear and projects are scoped without a full understanding of the expertise required. Esri user models now use a license structure designed to help but can be tricky to implement well. The result is not a lack of skill, but a lack of shared structure for understanding how GIS work is organized.
This presentation explores how keeping up with new skill sets requires shared terminology across the organization. It highlights why evaluating roles is critical to organizational capabilities and how to address this shift moving forward with changing Esri models. Especially relevant for people in organizations with many GIS users and limited capacity for designing the systems and workflows behind them.

Speakers

Michelle Toner

Senior Technical Specialist | Spatial Solutions, Haley & Aldrich

Michelle Toner is a Senior Technical Specialist - Spatial Solutions Lead at Haley & Aldrich. Her work includes designing and implementing approaches for environmental and climate-related analysis on projects that require new or adapted methods. This includes infrastructure vulnerability... Read More →

Tuesday May 26, 2026 3:15pm - 3:45pm EDT
Room 168

GIS and Us

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Spring NEARC 2026

Michelle Toner

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Success you have shared X tickets.

Spring NEARC 2026

Michelle Toner

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