Matt ForrestMar 31, 2026
Navigating Your Geospatial Career 🗺️
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Navigating Your Geospatial Career 🗺️
Matt Forrest
The geospatial industry is evolving rapidly, leaving many experienced professionals feeling lost. This video introduces The Spatial Lab, a new resource designed to provide the clear direction and roadmap you need to navigate these changes effectively.
Navigating Your Geospatial Career 🗺️
Matt Forrest
The geospatial industry is evolving rapidly, leaving many experienced professionals feeling lost. This video introduces The Spatial Lab, a new resource designed to provide the clear direction and roadmap you need to navigate these changes effectively.
Chapters
00:00
Introduction: The Industry Shift
Acknowledging the shift in geospatial technology and the modern data stack.
00:15
The Need for a Plan
00:35
Introducing The Spatial Lab
00:56
Overcoming Career Paralysis
01:37
Solving the Direction Problem
02:00
AI's Impact on Learning
Transcript
00:00
if you are watching this, you probably have already read the newsletter or watched a video.
00:04
You've seen me talk about cloud, native formats, Spatial SQL, the modern data stack.
00:08
You know the industry is shifting, so I'm not going to convince you that things are changing.
00:13
You already know that.
00:14
What I want to talk about is the question you have been sitting on.
00:17
What do you actually do about it?
00:20
because knowing the landscape is changing, and having a plan for you, how to personally navigate it are two completely different things.
00:26
And if you're being honest, you probably don't have that plan yet.
00:28
That is exactly why I built the Spatial Lab.
00:31
I surveyed over 1400 geospatial professionals earlier this year And I read every single open ended response, more than 700 of them.
00:40
You want to know what I heard over and over?
00:42
Things like this?
00:43
I am stuck in my career, I am lost.
00:45
I don't know where to begin to make the transition.
00:48
There are so many things I am really confused.
00:50
And these aren't beginners saying this.
00:52
These are people with 5, 10, 15 years of experience, people who are good at what they do, but they feel the ground moving under them and they don't know which direction to go.
01:01
65% said that their biggest question is just what?
01:04
What should I even learn?
01:06
Not how to learn it, what to learn.
01:08
They are paralyzed by choice.
01:10
And I get it.
01:10
You open a browser tab and start learning something and 20 minutes later you close it because you're not even sure you picked the right thing.
01:16
Should I learn Geo parquet or Parquet postgis or duckdb?
01:19
Should I be learning Python or does AI make that irrelevant now?
01:24
That feeling of overwhelm, that's not a knowledge problem, that's a direction problem.
01:28
And more content doesn't solve a direction problem.
01:31
Another YouTube video does not solve it.
01:32
Another udemy course at, 12% completion does not solve it.
01:36
What solves it is someone who has been where you want to go, looking at where you are right now and telling you exactly what to do next.
01:43
Now here's the other thing that changed.
01:45
AI rewrote the rules.
01:47
The old model of learning GIS was tools.
01:49
First, memorize the interface, follow a tutorial step by step.
01:53
Write the code yourself, hope you can reproduce it on your own data.
01:57
That model is done.
01:59
AI can write code now.
02:00
It can write the Python script, it can help you write the SQL query.
02:03
What it can't do is decide what to build why it matters or how it fits into a modern spatial architecture.
02:10
The professionals who are going to thrive in the next five years are the ones who understand concepts, who can tell an AI what they want because they actually understand the system.
02:19
That is a fundamentally different skill than memorizing syntax.
02:22
And almost nobody is teaching it that way.
02:24
Every other geospatial learning space is still stuck in the old model.
02:28
Tutorials, codalongs, watch me do it and hope you can copy it.
02:32
We are doing something different.
02:33
The Spatial Lab is three things.
02:36
First, it's a personalized roadmap.
02:38
When you join, you take an onboarding quiz.
02:40
It asks about your background, your current skills, what role you're targeting, where you want to be in a year.
02:45
I read every single response personally and I build you a learning plan.
02:49
Not a template, not an algorithm.
02:51
Me looking at your situation and telling you here is what to focus on in this order, starting now.
02:57
I know that sounds like it does not scale and honestly it is a lot of work.
03:00
But it is the most valuable thing I can give you because it eliminates the single biggest blocker not knowing what to do next.
03:07
Second is the community.
03:08
You are not learning alone anymore.
03:10
The spatial Lab is a room full of analysts, engineers, architects, career pivoters, students, people at different stages, but all moving in the same direction.
03:18
They share what they are working on, they share job postings, they ask questions and actually get answers from people who do this work every day.
03:25
79% of people I surveyed said that community is the most important thing to them when learning.
03:30
And yet, most of them are learning completely alone.
03:33
That gap is what the Spatial lab fills.
03:36
Third is the live sessions.
03:38
Every week we get on a call and learn together.
03:40
These aren't pre recorded lectures, they are live, interactive and you can ask questions.
03:44
Topics range from foundational concepts all the way to advanced spatial architecture.
03:49
Every session gets tagged by topic and skill level and goes into a searchable replay catalog.
03:54
So Whether you have 30 minutes or three hours, you can find exactly what is relevant to your roadmap.
03:58
That's it.
03:59
Roadmap, community, live session.
04:01
No filler courses, no 12 module curriculums that you'll never finish.
04:05
Just three things that actually move people forward.
04:07
Now, I want to be direct about who this is for because I do not want you to join and feel like it is not your space.
04:11
If you come from a Traditional GIS background, ArcGIS, desktop workflows, shapefiles and you want to modernize without drowning in code, this is for you.
04:20
If you are pivoting into geospatial from data engineering or software or environmental science and need to understand the landscape first.
04:28
If you are pivoting into geospatial from data engineering or software or environmental science and you need to understand understand the landscape fast, this is for you.
04:35
If you are a mid career and you are good at your job but you feel stuck and you know there is a next level you cannot quite see, this is for you.
04:42
If you want to go from analyst to architect, from the person who executes to the person who designs the system, this is for you.
04:48
You not need a specific degree, you need a direction.
04:51
And you need to be willing to show up.
04:53
Spatial lab is $97 a month.
04:55
You can cancel anytime.
04:57
There's no contract and no lock in for that.
04:59
You get everything I just described.
05:01
The personalized roadmap for me, full community access, weekly live sessions, the complete replay catalog, all the learning tracks, the modern GS accelerator, everything.
05:10
If you want to go further, one on one coaching mastermind groups with advanced peers, direct message access.
05:15
97 but the base tier is everything most people need.
05:18
I want to address the thing you're probably thinking right now.
05:21
You've been burned before.
05:22
You've bought courses that sit unfinished.
05:23
you've signed up for platforms you stopped logging into after two weeks.
05:26
I'm not going to tell you that will not happen here.
05:29
What I will tell you is that this is built differently.
05:32
There's no multimodule curriculum to fall behind on.
05:35
There are live sessions you actually want to show up to because you can ask questions.
05:39
There's a community of people who notice when you are not around.
05:42
And there is a roadmap that gives you clarity so you will never open up the lab wondering what to do.
05:47
That combination of accountability, belonging and direction is what keeps people engaged.
05:51
Courses only give you the content.
05:53
This gives you all three look, you've been reading the newsletter and watching my videos.
05:58
You have been watching the industry move.
05:59
You know what is happening.
06:01
The question is not whether you need to adapt.
06:03
The question is whether you are going to keep figuring it out alone.
06:07
Let someone who does this every day hand you the map.
06:09
Click below.
06:10
Join the lab.
06:10
Take the quiz.
06:11
I will personally build you your roadmap.
06:13
And for the first time in a long time, you will know exactly what to do next.
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