With a career spanning academia, industry, and global leadership, Aaron Addison has spent decades shaping the future of geospatial technology. He began as a practitioner, studying geography before moving into forestry and natural resources to explore photogrammetry, remote sensing, and other spatial sciences. After two decades in the professional field and earning a graduate degree in geospatial sciences, Addison joined Washington University in St. Louis, where he established and led the university’s geospatial department, launched its GIS certificate program, and taught for more than thirteen years. His path later led him into consulting and ultimately to the World Geospatial Industry Council (WGIC), where he now serves as Executive Director. Representing and advocating for companies across the geospatial and Earth observation sectors, WGIC focuses on issues such as education, workforce development, data privacy, AI, and sustainability. As Addison explains, his commitment to the field runs deep: he loves the people, the technology, and the potential of geospatial innovation.
“I want to see the world be a better place for my family, my daughters, and future generations. Whatever I can do to help get towards that goal is what gets me out of bed and motivates me to keep working.”
Addison serves on the Advisory Board for Geo Week 2026 and will join Dr. Shawana Johnson on a panel titled Empowering the Future: Trends Transforming the Geospatial Workforce. In a conversation with Geo Week News, Addison explores the difference between completing routine tasks and developing deeper understanding, and examines ways to equip emerging geospatial professionals with the skills and opportunities they need to thrive. Addison highlights that while geospatial job openings exist, navigating pathways to these opportunities can be challenging for many early-career professionals. Building a career in geospatial may benefit from formal education, but practical skills and a genuine passion for addressing real-world challenges are often equally important.
In a previous panel discussion, you mentioned “not just following the rules but really understanding what you’re doing.” I really liked that quote because I think sometimes in college, students - like myself at times - would just follow what professors say but don’t really know what’s going on.
Aaron Addison:
When I was teaching, it was easy to produce students who were really good at following directions but didn’t really understand what they were doing.
That’s a differentiator for people in the job market. If you have a deeper understanding of what’s going on than your peers, that moves your name to the top of the list.
Abigail Hart:
For sure. I think sometimes students can be focused on getting the degree as the goal instead of on what it takes to earn it.
Aaron Addison:
That’s fair. It’s the way you’ve been conditioned. That’s what you’ve been set up to buy into, and so it’s understandable why many people do - as a means to an end. You’re not really there for the education; you’re there for the degree. “I didn’t necessarily want to go to school. I wanted the degree.”
When I was in undergrad, professors would come in and say, “If I tell you what I had for breakfast, take notes. It might be on the exam.” That’s compliance. Not only to listen, but also to internalize what they say, not necessarily mastering the subject. To say “I don’t want you to question it; I want you to do as I say” isn’t teaching.
And you see that with people who are not cut out to be leaders. They just want to be obeyed. Like a parent saying, “Because I said so.” That doesn’t help anyone understand why they’re doing something. It’s just compliance.
And that bleeds over into education at all levels. By the time you get to college, a lot of young adults are starting to question that approach. They’re asking, “What are we doing? Why are we doing this?”
When I taught, on the first day of class, I always asked students, “Why are you here? What do you want to do? What are you trying to accomplish?” Some would say, “I don’t know.” And I’d tell them, “You’re about to take on six figures of debt. You better figure out why you’re here.”
It was about getting them to think more deeply about their education.
Abigail Hart:
I went to college during the COVID Zoom era, so it was a lot of memorizing and scrambling. It didn’t feel like true learning a lot of the time.
Aaron Addison:
That’s a great example. My daughters went to college during the COVID era as well, and one of them said, “I get that they are having to learn remote learning and everything too. But I don’t really care. This is my education. This is my one shot.” She realized that those years mattered.
The faculty perspective is often “this too shall pass.” They kept one foot in online learning and the other in their in-person work. Not many were 100% invested in Zoom learning. Some professors thought that it would go away, and they would be able to go back to regular teaching soon enough. However, for the students who were in school for the majority of COVID, this wasn’t helpful to them. So when everything went remote, a lot of students got short-changed.
And honestly, I have a lot of respect for anyone who went through that and still came out with a degree and a job. That was not easy.
What breakthroughs in geospatial technology do you think are underappreciated but will have a big impact in the next five years?
Aaron Addison:
I think there are a couple of things where improvements have been made. Software and technology interoperability is often overlooked. When I started, every software format was proprietary. Everything had to be translated, often imperfectly. Over time, we not only got better translations but also a paradigm shift: instead of translating, we can now access data via APIs or other means. We have JSON, REST, and other endpoints where data can be served and shared responsibly.
It’s not as flashy or exciting as creating a map or using AI. I purposely avoid overhyping AI, and not because it isn’t impactful, but because there’s a lot of hype around it. AI can do some things, but there’s a bigger list of things it can’t do. That’s a blind spot for many people. Sometimes when I’m on stage, I joke that people treat AI like a condiment - sprinkle it on something, and it magically improves it. It’s on everything, much like “Internet this” or “web that” 20 years ago. You know, e-books were called “e-books” until they just became books. Why do we always feel the need to differentiate like that?
I’d say interoperability has been underappreciated. Massive headway has been made, but it often doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
Drawing on your program management leadership in workforce development for the World Geospatial Industry Council, what are the most critical changes that need to occur in both corporate training and higher education to ensure the geospatial industry has the talent required for future demands?
Aaron Addison:
I always say I try to be directionally correct, not precisely wrong, so I tend not to get too caught up in exact numbers. That is a preface to saying that no matter who’s study or market forecast you want to subscribe to - and there are many to pick from, half a dozen or more organizations who analyze the geospatial market - they all say roughly the same thing. It might vary a little here or there, but they all agree that the industry is on a strong growth trajectory over the next five to six years. The high end of those estimates suggests the industry will double in economic size over that period.
If we believe that’s even remotely true, maybe it’s not quite doubling, but it’s still significant, then where are the people who are going to make that happen? That’s the workforce piece. Looking at formal education, universities, if you research the largest programs that graduate geospatial students, what’s the biggest number you can think of graduating in any given year? It’s not a lot: 20, maybe 50. It’s not hundreds. Certainly not thousands.
You can’t take four years to graduate students and only have 50 people to show for it while there are so many job openings on the market. If the industry is going to double, we could have 80,000 job openings in four to five years, yet still only have 50 students graduating. So the supply - the number of students entering the workforce - does not meet the demand, which is the job openings. Everything between supply and demand remains unresolved, or in other words, it’s an opportunity for people to fill jobs.
That’s where we have a need and addressing it will require a variety of methods. Formal education is part of the solution, but so are credit and noncredit programs, corporate training, community colleges, certificates, and micro-credentials. There are professional programs through universities, more like an MBA for geospatial. None of these solutions is sufficient alone; meeting the need requires all of them. They each have a role to play.
Beyond that, there’s the need for upskilling and reskilling. Nobody’s quite sure what that fully means yet in the world of AI, or more broadly, in the context of rapidly changing technology. Today it’s AI, but tomorrow it could be quantum computing or something else entirely. Yes, AI is front and center now, but we’ve seen rapid technological shifts before, and we’ll see them again. The framework we use to think about workforce needs must extend beyond any one technology, including AI.
I think the level of education is not as important as understanding what you’re doing. Before this interview, we talked about the “why”, why you do what you do and what it all means. That understanding is as important as the formal education you pursue.
It seems that if a degree focuses on doing tedious tasks, AI can handle those tasks, so don’t focus solely on them. If that means pursuing a graduate degree, additional education, or a certificate, so be it.
But more now than ever, employers care less about where you went to school and more about whether you can contribute on day one.
Based on your experience with the GeoAction Africa project and other international work, what strategies help build sustainable local geospatial workforces?
Aaron Addison:
The Geo Action Africa report was commissioned to demonstrate how geospatial and Earth observation technologies can be used in service of small stakeholder farmers across Africa. In Africa, over 60% of the food supply comes from small farmers, meaning farms of less than 10 acres.
These farmers have some of the lowest crop yields on the planet, and the population in Africa is exploding, so they need to grow more food. How are you going to do that? There are only so many ways to approach it. What we definitively know doesn’t work - whether in Africa or in India, where I worked for about 15 years on similar projects - is to parachute in with some sort of solution.
Then say, “I’m here to save the day,” and leave. That doesn’t work because people show up, say, “Do it my way and everything will be OK,” and then leave. That approach isn’t sticky; it lacks permanence. Even in your own life, when someone tells you, “Do it this way,” it’s different from taking ownership yourself.
The key to unlocking success, which has been demonstrated in our work and other projects around the world, is building solutions that allow local populations to advocate for themselves. For example, one of the most useful tools I ever deployed had a fancy name, the Deforestation Calculator, but it was literally just 12 lines of JavaScript on a web page.
It allowed local communities to enter how many hectares of forest they had, how many hectares they planned to cut down, and how many hectares they would plant, over what period of time. They could run the calculations themselves - it’s just simple arithmetic, adding and subtracting - and they could do it on a phone or laptop without attending a workshop or relying on anyone else. The important piece is that they were in control and could see the numbers for themselves. They could determine whether what they were doing was sustainable.
This gave them knowledge they could use to make decisions and advocate on their own behalf, whether regarding natural resources, infrastructure, or microfinance. The key, time and time again, is that they do it themselves. Nobody is telling them what to do. This is essential for permanence.
Another point is that we often get too immersed in the technical jargon of geospatial technology. If I’m a farmer, and you start telling me all about AI, I honestly don’t care. My AI question is, “Do I plant my field today or not?” That’s it. I don’t care about the technical details. I need to farm today, whether AI can help or not.
Sometimes, people get lost in discussions of prompting models, fine-tuning, and other technical aspects. That approach doesn’t meet people where they are. You’re communicating on your terms, not theirs. Being excited about the technical aspects of AI doesn’t mean everyone else will be equally excited. The focus should be on building tools that allow local communities to advocate for themselves. That is the core principle and the foundation to build on.
How is the pervasive implementation of automated and intelligent technologies such as AI-powered mapping and reality capture processing fundamentally transforming the strategic roles and core responsibilities of professionals in this field?
Aaron Addison:
I think anytime a tool is introduced into a market, there’s going to be a period of disruption. A great example of that is when calculators were brand new.
It’s interesting to go back and look at the same comments from teachers during that era about calculators: “Not in my classroom. People won’t know how to do this. There’s no critical thinking,” and all of the same concerns. You see that pattern in a lot of technology evolution.
Now, you can argue that there are differences with AI and what’s happening there, but fundamentally, AI is still a tool. It’s not a magic bean; it’s not something that can solve every problem. That’s where the danger lies—there’s going to be an overcorrection. People will probably go a little too far with it, then step back and say, “Hey, there’s a time and place for AI, but it’s not everything.”
It’s like giving a child a hammer for Christmas: everything then becomes a nail. It doesn’t matter if it’s a nail, a light bulb, or a toe—they’re going to hammer it because the tool is new and exciting. I think that’s the piece that has yet to unfold around technology like AI.
There’s no doubt AI is good at solving tedious tasks. If you can take whatever you’re doing in your workflow for GIS, geospatial, or Earth observation and reduce it to a series of tedious tasks, then AI can help. That’s a positive thing. It can automate tasks, freeing you up to focus on things AI can’t do - like answering the “why” question or providing discernment, the “so what” piece.
When we create maps and outputs from geospatial data, we often think that once the map is made, we’re done. But for everybody else in the world, the map is the beginning, not the end. Only then can they start doing the work, because now they have the map. Meanwhile, we might feel like, “Oh wow, my job’s done; I’ll take a break,” while everyone else is just getting started.
So, how do we support them? We need to ask questions like, "what is this map for?"
It’s not enough to make the best map we can; we have to understand what the map is for and how it will be used.
Given your role on the WGIC Industry/Academia Committee, how can institutions of higher education better align their research and curriculum with the immediate and emerging needs of the geospatial industry?
Aaron Addison:
That committee aims to build bridges between academia and industry. I was in academia for over a decade and in the corporate world for two decades, so seeing it from both sides is beneficial whenever it comes time to find a way for them to meet in the middle.
When I go to academics and talk to them, they say things like, “Nobody from industry ever comes to talk to us.” And when I go to industry, they say, “Nobody from academia ever comes to talk to us.” So, then the question becomes, what can we do to help that? What opportunities? What platforms? What outputs? Where can we meet and build bridges?
The industry needs the talent coming out of academia and the research, but academics are not known for being connectors with industry - they stay pretty much on campus doing their own thing. That’s fine, but it doesn’t lead to extended networks or keeping fingers on the pulse of industry.
Over time, because of that, some students coming out of these programs are not ready to work in the real world. In industry terms, they are not “workforce ready.”
A good example: in some of the largest geospatial teams in the United States, like a large city’s geospatial department, there might be 100 people working on geospatial operations, but only four or five of those are using desktop software. Everybody else is doing something else - web, cloud, fieldwork, writing code, or combinations of these. That’s great.
Now, if you inventory all the undergraduate GIS programs in the U.S., what do they teach? Desktop GIS. They’re teaching entire classrooms of people for only four out of 100 potential jobs. What about other topics? Enterprise, networking, cybersecurity, data authentication and curation, and interoperability - these are harder to pin down, but they are essential.
A practical example for marketing: it’s super helpful to know a bit of Photoshop. You probably never took a class in Photoshop, but it’s an indispensable skill - especially when making a deck that needs a small image tweak. That’s not part of marketing 101, and it’s not formally taught, but it’s something you need. Geospatial is seeing similar skills emerge.
As an industry, those kinds of skills are becoming more important as AI continues to grow. Looking further into the future, consider digital twins. If a student comes up after a talk and asks, “I want to make digital twins my career. How do I get a degree in digital twins?" Nobody can answer that. Even asking for five or six courses to take to be really good at digital twins is currently unanswered. That’s a blind spot and a big opportunity for someone to step in, define the path, and build expertise.
