The shortage of trained and ready-to-deliver manpower impacts the development of geospatial. Using this as a business opportunity, GIS education and training institutes are trying to bridge the gap between the demand and supply of meaningfully trained geospatial specialists.

In India, the last decade has seen a boom in deemed universities - most have come up overnight and claimed to offer 'international' degrees in all branches of sciences and arts- geospatial included. A recent survey has shown an 80% increase in the number of such universities and a 53 % increase in the enrollment of students in the last decade. The sheer number of willing-to-pay top buck hopefuls, takes care of the ROI in this business of geospatial education. If one pays attention to the future career track of many of these graduates and post graduates - a large number are stuck doing data-entry, most for lack of training. If geospatial is to see better days, we need to address the issue of pedagogy in GIS and take a serious stock of the lack of teacher-trainers in this domain. Most of us today, in the geospatial profession are self-taught and though can deliver professionally, will be handicapped as teachers. We need to have teachers who can effectively merge technology and applications of geospatial in their regular GIS teaching.

The business of GIS education needs to learn and implement strategies for a sustainable and positive growth. Possibly use business GIS! The need to include GIS within the curricula of business courses is at the best understated and under-implemented. The impetus to change this is the educator track during the ESRI Business GIS Summit.