Zoe Smith

Hi, I'm Zoe.

My career with GIS is all about empowering people with data.

I make applications which give them information they need.

When people can really see and understand what's happening all around them, they can make better decisions and have a positive impact on the world.

Following the completion of my HNC I moved to Qatar to work on preparations for the Fifa World Cup 2022. I had never left the UK before, so it was a big challenge to begin my career somewhere completely new.... but I'm really glad I made the leap!

I developed quickly from a young industry starter into a professional, and it was eye-opening to work in a different country and culture, where people's working circumstances are very different to where I had trained. I gained a lot of respect for my colleagues working in places with less access to technology that I took for granted. It also sparked a passion for travel I did not know I had before I left.

As a technician I was responsible for creating and maintaining a reference system for the country's roads and other important infrastructure (like stadiums and car parks). This means giving each individual asset - like a road or bus stop - a unique number to identify it. It sounds simple, but no map had been built like this before. I had to use satelitte images and data gathered from previous surveys to create it myself. This map could then be used by all the different agencies involved in maintaining the road network, responding to accidents, and planning future work to improve transport. Maintaining traffic flow and preventing accidents will be easier as a result of my work, something I'm proud to have achieved.

While I was in Qatar I also gained my accreditation with the Engineering Council through the Institution of Civil Engineers. Accreditation means you can get paid more, especially working in consultancy, and it increases your employability. Many companies will list membership of a professional body as a desired quality when you apply for jobs. It also helped me build my professional network. I get regular newsletters updating me about my industry, and now I'm accredited I get to help mentor others who are starting the process.

After five years in Qatar, I returned home to work on High Speed 2 (HS2). HS2 is a trainline that will connect London and Birmingham, reducing the journey time between the two cities to less than an hour. My job was to create maps to help engineers communicate with people impacted by the building - helping them explain what they were going to build, where it would go and why it was needed - and also allow engineers to get permission from landowners to go on their land!

To take my work making data accessible one step futher, I applied to Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) to become a transport consultant. I was appotined and became a consultant working on the SingleView of the Network project. The aim of SingleView was to create one single resource that everyone can use to understand transport in the West Midlands region. Realtime updates of the current situation and information about planned works are all in once place that is easy to find. You can see one of the applications I helped develop for this, a coordination centre dashboard, in the video below.

My dashboard is now displayed on a huge screen at TfWM’s new Regional Transport Coordination Centre and can be viewed online by TfWM managers from any location.  The dashboard is also used by partners like National Highways, local authorities, transport providers and in the future emergency services, giving everyone the same overview of the entire region. Users can improve the experience of the network, changing services to decrease waiting times for public transport tand make it more accessible. They use it to plan how to reduce congestion and improve air quality.

I'm really happy that the SingleView project is helping people right now in my area, and it also helped me professionally. TfWM recognised how important communicating data in this way is, and built a new role into their organisation to help deliver more projects like this, which I now hold.

GIS is a way of making data and insights attractive but understandable to professionals and our communities, helping improve the relationships between decision makers and those who are impacted by those decisions. I'm really excited to be working in a job where I can see my work actually transforming things on the ground, and where my skills are in such demand.

In 5 years time I hope to be working to develop data driven policy ideas and strategies to improve inequality in the West Midlands Region, and working with education providers to help more people start exciting careers in the GIS sector. When I was a teenager coding for fun I didn't realise that my technical skills could be connected to geography to do things that make a difference in people's lives.

Ask more questions! When I first started I was so concerned with bothering people I lost out on valuable engagement time with subject experts. There is no growth within the sector if we do not challenge those who already work there.