Like many other industry sectors, the Australian geospatial community faces a severe workforce shortage that is holding back business development.

One solution to this problem is for organisations to think more broadly when it comes to the recruitment of staff, by welcoming diverse individuals into the fold.

This includes the community of young neurodiverse Australians, who currently suffer a 34% unemployment rate. This is even though it has been demonstrated that neurodiverse individuals are ideally suited to many roles in realm of geospatial data collection and analysis.

An exemplar of this is the company Australian Spatial Analytics (ASA), a fairly young firm that has undergone enormous expansion in recent years by focusing on training neurodiverse individuals and finding employment for them within a wide variety of organisations.

One proof of ASA’s approach is the many awards it has received, such as the Innovation Award (Medium to Large Businesses) and Workforce Development and Inclusion Award in the recent 2024 Geospatial Excellence Awards for Queensland. The company’s CEO, Geoffrey Smith, also was recognised, being awarded the Diversity and Inclusion Award.

The Workforce Development and Inclusion Award was presented jointly to ASA along with Department of Resources (Queensland) for the Employment Transition Program for geospatial data analysts.

On the back of this success, ASA, in conjunction with the Geospatial Council of Australia (GCA) will present a special webinar on 17 October 2024, outlining the ways in which ASA helps develop the skills of talented individuals with the aim of eventually seeing them move into employment with companies or government departments.

The webinar will be of interest to Australian organisations that are struggling to attract enough staff with the right skills and the capacity to grow.

The webinar’s presenters will be:

• Samantha Garbutt, Chief People Officer, ASA, who brings more than 15 years’ experience and leadership development to her role managing the People and Impact Team to support ASA’s growing force of 100-plus analysts.
• Stephen de Groot, Data Analyst, ASA, who is working on geospatial projects such as complex electrical networks and emergency data management for one of Australia’s largest councils.
• Tiarna Templeton, Data Analyst, ASA, who is working on creating a ‘single source of truth’ for Queensland’s electricity assets via the Enzen/Energy Queensland digitisation project.

Registration is free of charge for individual GCA members and $55 for non-members.