Page 12 - 2022_49.2

Are We Pushing a Pull Door?... continued from previous page
Job Shadowing & Internships
Consider giving students the opportunity to experience the day in the life of a
surveyor firsthand. Bring them along in your truck, and have them sit next to you
at the computer. Let them see the ins and outs of a real day in order to see if it’s
interesting to them.

Job shadowing also doesn’t have to be just for K-12 students. It’s also a good
opportunity for people who are looking to switch careers and aren’t sure what to
do next. Our surveying chapters could easily undertake Outreach to companies
who would be willing to set up job shadowing programs.
Internships are the next logical step up from job shadowing. If students are
still interested in learning more after shadowing you, hire them for a summer
internship so they can experience doing the work themselves.

Target your local community colleges if high schoolers don’t seem ready to take on an internship. One attendee’s company has hosted
interns for the entire summer, where they were cross-trained between the field and the office.

Summer & Bootcamps
An exciting first-time boot camp is taking place this summer at
Vincennes University in Indiana. A teacher in the program has created a
three-day summer boot camp for kids. Day one will be an introduction
to surveying. Next, it will cover field notes and then pacing.

From a society standpoint, boot camps could be set up regionally and run for one week, with parents able to drop off their middle school
students and head to work. Surveying volunteers could donate a day or two of their time to help run the camp and educate participants.

Another option would be a bite-sized weekend camp or camping trip.
Advertise to all ages

Stepping up our K-12 education and outreach efforts will take something that’s new to most
surveyors: advertising. Specifically, reaching young people on the platforms they use most,
with content that resonates with them.

We will need to create modern, fresh, and eye-catching content to link exciting professional
work like drones, helicopters, high-rise buildings, and climate science with land surveying.
Today’s surveying work goes far beyond property boundaries, and it’s time for us to let the
world know it.

This will likely mean doing things like:
• Hiring a professional marketing firm
• Creating a national logo for the surveying profession

• Updating videos like the ones on landsurveyingcareer.com
• Getting active on social media
• Taking professional photos and footage

• Using hashtags effectively
It will take communal action to begin speaking with one professional voice and creating valuable content that can be cross-promoted
and used by different regions. But it’s a critical step that will move our profession forward.
Roundtable attendees left the outreach session planning to pool financial resources between 13 western states, create a new video,
and build up a budget for additional assets.
It’s clear that social media videos like those popular on TikTok are extremely short and have a clear hook that draws viewers in. New
advertisements and sponsored content for the Young Surveyors Network should follow this same philosophy.
Perhaps it’s also time to supplement our photo collections full of rocks and trees with more interesting content like Go-Pro footage of
the day in the life of a surveyor, or a time-lapse of a project from beginning to end.
In short, we need to work on our professional branding. It needs to be visual, compelling, and speak to our target audience: those who
don’t know anything yet about surveying.

10 The Nevada Traverse Vol.49, No.2, 2022