There is an existential crisis brewing in the geospatial industry, one that has been bubbling up for years and worrying anyone tasked with managing operations for surveying firms. Any conversation about the state of this industry today will inevitably turn to the workforce at some point, as the aging industry is reckoning with a talent shortage. It’s often cited, for example, that more workers are retiring from the industry than entering it, a troubling trend given the growing demand for these services across many different sectors.
Given these issues, the industry is hard at work looking for ways to attract young talent to the industry, with a variety of different initiatives targeted at young people of all ages. Only time will tell how any individual effort will work, but it’s clear that new strategies are necessary. One example of this new outlook on attracting new talent into the industry can be seen with the aptly named The Survey School, founded by Rami Tamimi.
This online program, which is offered as a monthly subscription and features both video lectures and opportunities for hands-on experience, was founded in 2024 and already has over 100 active students. Recently, Geo Week News spoke with Tamimi as well as the company’s other employee, Valeria Montero, about how the program works and what they are hoping to do with the new education process.
While this school is relatively new, Tamimi is a recognizable name for many in the industry. In 2020, he started making surveying content on YouTube, something he said started as making videos for students he taught at Ohio State University before it “quickly evolved into making videos for pretty much everyone.”
Today, he has over 75,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, and he tells Geo Week News that his channel has over five million combined views. After receiving the Younger Geospatial Professional Award at Geo Week 2022, he says he started to build more relationships with companies around the industry, and as he continued making this content showcasing what the industry has to offer, the idea started to click.
“It was at this point I realized, Hey, we should really build some kind of educational platform,” Tamimi said. “People are learning how to do surveying, but there’s no real structure. There’s no coursework that you can do unless you go to university. So The Survey School was the solution for that, where you can get online courses, you can get a community of students that are working together globally, and we’re providing all of this at a much lower price than a university would.”
Montero joined the efforts later, telling Geo Week News that she first reached out to Tamimi in 2024 after finding his YouTube Channel. She says that she comes from a family of civil engineers and surveyors who have often mentioned the lack of resources for mentorship in the field, and decided she wanted to help Tamimi with this project.
One of the goals of The Survey School is to appeal to a wide swath of potential students, all of whom will have different life circumstances and thus will have their own pace of studying to follow. To meet those needs, the program has a series of modules and phases, ranging from an introduction to surveying to industry-specific courses like construction and geodetic surveying, among others. For each course, students have access to video lectures from Tamimi, and as he explains it’s not just him in front of a whiteboard discussing theory.
“It’s literally me out in the field explaining concepts and actually doing the work,” he explains. “If it’s an office-related topic, then I am inside. But the idea is my face is in front of everything. It’s me lecturing and showing exactly how to do the different things that I’m explaining rather than just theory. I’m actually out there showing them.”
Students are then given quizzes after every group of roughly four or five videos, all of which build up to a final exam, for which a 70 percent is needed to pass and receive a certificate of achievement. After this, students start to have access to more offerings. First, they are tasked with putting together a research-based thesis. Students get access to the hardware and software, all of which is donated by industry partners such as Emlid, DJI, and GEODNET, needed to complete these projects, with help from Tamimi in how to put these together, potentially being able to go to conferences like Geo Week to present these projects.
Finally, students have access to in-person lab sessions to get hands-on experience with equipment like drones, terrestrial scanners, etc. For these, students will be flown to Detroit, where Tamimi is based, to complete this work, all on The Survey School’s dime.
“We would fly them out to Detroit and I would cover all of their expenses to bring them here and teach them everything they need to know,” he said. “We’re not a university, so we don’t have high costs. The money that we charge, we reinvest it back into our students. If you’re a good student, you’re performing well, and you’re really committed, I’m willing to pay for everything just to bring you here and teach you what you need to know.”
As alluded to above, the students in this program do run the gamut, according to Tamimi and Montero. They include younger students looking to break into their first professional roles, established professionals looking to set up a second career, and those looking to pivot into the next stage of their professional life. All of these students form one cohesive community, which is reflected in the school. In addition to the class modules above, students have access to “mastermind” sessions, which are live Zoom calls where students and Tamimi can collaborate and ask questions. Additionally, The Survey School features a community board where students can discuss achievements, ask questions, and support each other in their learning.
The Survey School is still, of course, new and evolving, and Tamimi and Montero do have more plans for the future. First and foremost, they are working with licensing boards to become accredited, with their current structure meeting most of those frameworks already. Additionally, they are looking to attract more students and expand their professional partnerships with manufacturers and other companies in the industry. Tamimi, Montero, and some students will be in attendance at Geo Week 2025, so be on the lookout if you have questions or would like to get involved.
