Contributing to the continuity of the geospatial industry

In this exclusive interview, Shirley Chapunza highlights the importance of young surveyors to the future of the profession, and outlines how the FIG Young Surveyors Network (FIG YSN) is inspiring, supporting and empowering them around the world. The good news is that the gender balance is improving, with the number female surveyors on the rise. But the industry urgently needs more young people from all backgrounds. “Our industry has all the right ingredients to be an interesting career option: innovation, cool tech and social impact,” says the FIG YSN chair. “But we need to get the message out there, and academia also has a role to play.”

FIG YSN's mission is to inspire the next generation of surveyors. How is this put into practice?

Our mission is not just to ‘inspire’ them, but to ‘INSPIRE’ them. This stands for Inspire, Nurture, Strengthen, Promote, Innovate, Raise awareness, and Empower. In everything we do, we reinforce the awareness that, as a young surveyor, you’re contributing to something that’s much bigger than you; your work gives you the chance to leave a legacy of some sort.

We put this into practice by organizing numerous events – meetings, workshops, conferences and training courses – all over the world. We work in partnership with the FIG commissions, FIG foundations and FIG taskforces, and often with leading external associations like the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN), UN-Habitat, World Bank and FAO. Our activities and partnerships help to position the younger generation as the ambassadors and agents of change, and amplify the voices of young surveyors for the benefit of the industry. After all, the future of our planet – our common future – lies in their hands.

The biggest advantage of the YSN is the network itself. Young surveyors don’t only meet their peers, but also gain access to a global community of seasoned experts – and in terms of the learning experience that can’t be traded for anything. At an individual level, we give young surveyors the opportunity to gain international experience and exposure, helping to prepare them to become future leaders, and we support their personal and professional development through our flagship outreach and development programmes.

Are there any particular FIG YSN activities you are especially looking forward to this year?

I am really looking forward to the second YSN meeting for the Americas region, which is being held in the USA this October. We’re working to overcome the language challenges in the hope of encouraging more Spanish-speaking young surveyors to join us, so that everyone in that region can contribute their voices to the surveying profession. We’re also targeting attendees from the small-island developing states in the Caribbean. We’ve already made contact with a few surveyors there and hope to bring more of them into our network. We want this meeting to be as diverse as possible.

And before that, we’re gearing up for the 9^th FIG Young Surveyors Conference in Brisbane, Australia, as a pre-event to the 2025 FIG Working Week and Locate25 – the Australian Annual Surveyors Conference – in early April. Organized in collaboration with the Geospatial Council of Australia Young and Emerging Professionals, this promises to be a very exciting event, truly championing innovation. Based around the theme of ‘Next-gen Geospatial Professionals: Driving a Digitally Enabled Future’, it’s being hosted at one of the world’s largest digital interactive learning and display spaces: the Cube at Queensland University of Technology’s Science and Engineering Centre.

Since 2017, we’ve chosen to support a different charity during each event. This year, in conjunction with the FIG Commission on Hydrography and the Mapping the Plastic Working Group, we’ve selected an ocean conservation charity. As part of the charity event, we’re planning a geocaching activity with FIG Working Group on Learning Styles in Surveying Education. This is a great opportunity for us to highlight innovation in surveying education as well as showcasing the role that surveyors play in preserving the world’s oceans.

FIG YSN strongly emphasizes empowering communities through the engagement and leadership of young people. Can you share some practical examples?

The Volunteer Community Surveyor Program (VCSP) is a great example. This is our collaborative global outreach programme through which FIG young surveyors volunteer their time and energy to support humanitarian and environmental causes. It was actually started by a young surveyor. Supported by the FIG team in Copenhagen, as well as by the generous donations from our financial partners such as GLTN and Kadaster, and technical partners such as Trimble, young surveyors are deployed wherever they are needed to support mapping efforts.

Projects have included co-organizing mapathons in Tanzania, supporting organizations like OpenStreetMap, and providing training to private surveyors in Sierra Leone where surveying degrees are not available through local universities. These projects enable young surveyors to develop their interpersonal skills as well as their technical skills. They also broaden their horizons by integrating with diverse communities and embracing boundaries and differences. You come back a better professional, and also make a social impact by tangibly improving people’s lives.

To what extent is diversity & inclusion a topic within FIG YSN?

We are intentional about engaging and embracing diversity and being as inclusive as possible. In the past, it was a distinct objective to get more women involved when shaping our event programmes, for example, but that has now simply become an automatic and natural process – it’s part of who we are. Having said that, as a traditionally male-dominated industry, it’s not always an easy task to ensure a gender balance among keynote speakers, for example. The good news is that the demographic is shifting; the number of women in the industry is increasing and there are numerous female role models who will hopefully inspire even more females to join. And within YSN globally, we actually have more female chairs than male chairs.

Diversity is not just about gender, of course, but also about professional backgrounds. FIG has ten commissions covering many different disciplines, so we ensure that every programme we develop is interesting for these diverse groups of people. Moreover, we are keen to include and involve young surveyors in our network from as many different socioeconomic backgrounds as possible. In this context, various sources of sponsorship are available to young surveyors who have limited funds. One example is the FIG Foundation Young Surveyor Grant. Since 2006, this grant has enabled numerous recipients – male and female, from a wide range of countries – to attend events and make their voices heard.

In many parts of the world, the shortage of talented and skilled surveyors entering the job market has become a growing concern. What are today’s young people looking for?

I think that many young people are increasingly looking for work that has a purpose and social impact. They care about topics like sustainability, climate action and what is happening in the world around us.

At the same time, today’s youngsters are tech-savvy and are attracted by fast-paced technological developments. In this context, I’ve noticed that domains such as GIS and remote sensing tend to attract more young people than traditional areas such as cadastral surveying. But if it’s innovation that people are looking for, there’s plenty going on in some of those areas too – just think of how far we’ve come with smart total stations, compared to having to set out points in the past.

But perhaps youngsters would rather spend time in front of a screen than working outside and being exposed to the elements? This actually aligns well with the current evolution of the surveying role. Having traditionally been only data acquirers, as surveyors we increasingly need to also manage and analyse the data we’ve collected and present it to our customers and other stakeholders. This growing need for data management specialists is creating new and appealing roles for the younger generation in the surveying industry.

What can the geospatial industry do to turn the tide and to spark interest among young people in the field of surveying and mapping?

Our industry has all the right ingredients to be an interesting career option. You not only get to use some cool tech, but you can have a social impact too; you can make a real difference for the greater good. But we’re clearly still not packaging this in a way that the younger generation fully understand. Speaking from my own experience, I only ended up in surveying by accident. I actually applied to study mining engineering, but that programme was over-subscribed and I didn’t want to do a gap year, so the admissions officer suggested surveying instead. I knew nothing about it when I started out!

Having said that, there are now some really good things happening to get the message out there. I love Get Kids into Survey, for example, and how they use fun marketing materials to attract kids’ attention. And perhaps we could all do our bit by being more active on social media to share interesting insights into our working lives. 

I also think that academia has a role to play by keeping pace with where the industry is going so that curriculums remain interesting and relevant. Speaking from experience again, I must admit that my degree course was fine, but it didn’t really get exciting until my fourth year when I did my internship. Students shouldn’t have to wait three years for surveying to become interesting!

During your term as chair of FIG YSN, how do you hope to contribute to the continuity of the geospatial industry?

For the continuity of the surveying industry, it’s important that all young surveyors have the chance to come together, engage and contribute their voices to the profession. But last year, I noticed that not all regions were equally well represented and active within FIG YSN. Therefore, I’m working hard to make the network even more inclusive and diverse by zeroing in on specific countries within the regions, with the aim of establishing new local networks and stimulating more engagement. It’s rewarding to see that this is already paying off. We’ve had some very successful events recently, including in Romania and Nepal, both of which have helped to reinvigorate regions that had become somewhat dormant since the pandemic.

Another focus area for me is our mentoring programme, which I would like to be available to everyone over time. We ‘borrowed’ the concept from Australia’s Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI) (which is now the Geospatial Council of Australia, Ed.), and we have implemented it in Africa, but we’re now keen to expand it to other regions. But we can’t do this alone. We need support from FIG member associations, regional networks, corporate organizations and surveyors themselves so that we can pair mentees with mentors in multiple geographical locations. A spirit of collaboration and partnership will be essential to invest in the future and help us offer this opportunity to as many young surveyors as possible, so that we can keep transferring valuable skills and knowledge to support the continuity of the industry.

Besides this, I am personally very keen to ensure the continuity of FIG by developing a community for former FIG YSN members. Young professionals in their thirties tend to become less active due to other things going on in their lives, such as changing jobs and starting a family. As they get a little older and things stabilize, they have more time to engage with the community again. But we currently have two distinct groups – young professionals and seasoned professionals – and in your late 30s and early 40s, you might not fully identify with either. So where do you belong? This can leave people feeling a little lost and perhaps even discourage them from getting involved any more. Therefore, by the end of my term, I hope to have created a new platform to account for these ‘mid-career professionals’ too. This will not only help to smoothen the transition after FIG YSN, but will also ensure we don’t end up with a gap between the ‘older’ and the ‘younger’ generation – because if we do, the community could be at risk of just fading away.

Do you have a final message for the surveyors of the future?

Since being involved in FIG, I’ve learned that every societal problem has got a ‘land footprint’. I think the most important thing is that we, as young people, need to stay curious and keep on asking questions. Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? And then think about what we can do individually to make the best possible contribution, professionally, ethically and with integrity. We are solution providers – let’s keep championing new solutions. That way, we can hopefully be part of building a better future – not just for the surveying profession, but for the entire planet and for the people whose livelihoods depend on it.

About Shirley Chapunza

Shirley Chapunza (aged 29) first came into contact with the African arm of FIG YSN when she attended a regional meeting in Botswana as an intern in 2018. She has been chair of the global network since January 2024. Due to internal organizational reasons, her term will run for three years rather than two. She holds a bachelor’s degree in surveying and geomatics from Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. Following a few years as a teaching assistant, Shirley now works as an engineering surveyor at Bitumen World Civil Engineering Contractors company in Zimbabwe, which specializes in road construction, infrastructure development, concrete works and building projects using precast concrete solutions.

About the FIG Young Surveyors Network (YSN)

The FIG Young Surveyors Network was established as the Working Group 1.2: Young Surveyors Working Group of FIG Commission 1 at the XXIII FIG Congress (2006) held in Munich, Germany. This was upgraded to the Young Surveyors Network during the 2009 FIG Working Week in Eilat, Israel.

FIG YSN’s goal is to inspire the next generation of surveyors. The purpose is built on three pillars:

• To improve the number of young professionals participating within the FIG, including its 10 commissions.
• To help young professionals in the beginning of their careers with contacts.
• To increase co-operation between the commissions and the students and young professionals network.

The network – which is subdivided into five regional networks for the continents – has created an environment for young surveyors from different cultures, with different academic backgrounds and professional experiences from all over the globe to come together and learn from each other towards the sustenance of the surveying profession. The network is open to young surveyors (surveyors aged 35 years or under, or students of surveying or a related study) and young surveying professionals (graduated less than 10 years ago with a bachelor’s or master’s degree in surveying or a related study).

More information

https://www.fig.net/organisation/networks/ys/