u/failson316

Last year I was in a situation where remote-only wasn’t a preference, it was the only thing I could do. After a while the usual GIS career advice started driving me insane because so much of it basically boiled down to “just move” or “go network in person.”

At first I kept applying to every “Remote GIS Analyst” posting I saw. Hundreds of applicants, insane requirement lists, zero responses.

I eventually realized a lot of remote jobs weren’t even called GIS jobs. They were buried under stuff like permitting support, asset data cleanup, planning tech, environmental reporting, emergency management support, random utility data roles, things like that.

I also got way more picky about the kinds of organizations I applied to. Bigger utilities, state agencies with multiple offices, consulting firms that already had distributed teams. Small local governments saying “remote possible” usually meant “maybe after we trust you and also please come in twice a week.”

At some point I had this depressing little command center going: spreadsheet of applications, keyword buckets, follow-up dates, salary guesses, notes about which resume version I used.

I even took the coached career test because spending weeks staring at GIS job boards starts making you question your entire personality and whether you even want the field anymore. Weirdly it did help me notice I kept applying to roles heavy on project coordination and client stuff when the work I actually enjoy is more technical/data cleanup focused.

The other thing that helped was making a tiny portfolio with stuff I could safely show publicly. Fake parcel workflows, open-data dashboards, little QGIS scripts. Nothing fancy. Just proof I actually knew how to work through problems without needing proprietary data.

Still took way longer than I expected though. Remote-only job hunting kind of messed with my head after a while.

Anyway, just hoping this bit of unsolicited advise helps other job hunters out there. Good luck.

Been applying for about 5 months. I hit 327 applications before I finally got an offer and honestly I was ready to throw my laptop out the window. I kept thinking I needed another certificate or some massive portfolio project, but that wasn't it. I was just stuck in this loop of sending out garbage and wondering why nobody was calling.

The biggest wake-up call was realizing my resume was a total mess. I spent way too much time on academic projects that didn't matter and not enough on actual business impact. I used resumeworded to fix it. I stopped writing about my "tasks" and started writing about "results" in a way that actually made me look like an analyst.

I also had to stop the "spray and pray" thing. I was applying to anything with "data" in the title, even if I was completely unqualified. Once I narrowed my focus to just reporting and BI roles and stopped applying to jobs that required five years of experience I didn't have, I actually started getting responses.

Networking was the other part I hated, but I forced myself to do it. Not the "can I pick your brain" LinkedIn spam, but just talking to a few people from my old school or local meetups. The job I actually landed came from a referral after a 20-minute Zoom call. It felt a lot less like a math problem and more like just finally getting a foot in the door.

It's a slog, and there were days I didn't apply to anything because I was just too burnt out. But once I stopped pretending to be a senior expert and just showed I was someone who could learn fast and fix their messy Excel files, things finally clicked.