Might get a certificate in GIS and do a career change. It’s only 6 courses. I could also do a MS degree in GIS. I have 20 years in software development.
If you use GIS what do you use it for? What type of job do you do? I know in the past ArcGIS was the most popular package, is that still true?
Is the job market good for GIS users?
I use ArcGIS (specifically ArcMap) for my day-to-day GIS needs. I’m an environmental scientist, so it would be very difficult to do my job without GIS. People are always asking questions about the streams and rivers that in their backyards (Are they safe to swim in? Is there a regulated discharger upstream from a their favorite swimming hole? Is the stream designated for trout?) We make this information available through GIS layers (via an online map service) so that the people can answer these kinds of questions themselves. We use ArcMap to construct these layers.
I also use geospatial packages in R when I’ve got some serious number crunching to do. I don’t know Python, but I do know R. Let’s say I’ve got to do a gazillion spatial joins (joining a single point layer to a gazillion polygon layers so that I end up with a single table with a gazillion attributes for each xy coordinate). I can hack out a script in R that will do this in a few seconds. Maybe one day I’ll sit down and teach myself Python so I can do this in ArcMap. But since I use R for all of my other data analyses, it makes sense for me to keep doing it the way I have been doing.
I would say that in my field, not knowing how to use ArcMap is like not knowing how to use MS Word. Which means that GIS skills are essential, but not that remarkable. Everyone is expected to know the basics, at least. The 65-year-old administrative assistant in my department has done GIS work on a couple of projects, and she never took a course in GIS. Some folks in my workplace are immersed in a lot (like me), while others can go months without touching it. Folks who are hired specifically to be data scientists and database managers are usually considered “GIS gurus”. (We also have an IT department with a couple of uber GIS gurus. Their job is to keep the online map service running and to help staff troubleshoot their ArcMap problems.)
I can’t speak to the job market. I can just tell you about my department. We like GIS users to come with a whole bunch of other skills. So if someone is interviewing for a data scientist position and they know a whole lot about GIS but not much else, they will be at disadvantage over the person who knows GIS “well enough” but excels in the other areas of data science. I once worked with an intern who had great GIS skills, but froze up when I asked for her to generate some summary statistics using an Excel pivot table. Which is totally fine for an intern. I wouldn’t expect an intern to know what a pivot table is. But if someone is selling themselves as a data scientist, I would expect them to be able to do something like that just as easily as putting together a purty map. I would also want them to have a sense of what they are doing when they, say, use kriging to create a heat map in ArcMap. They may be able to create the most fabulous-looking heat map ever, but I think they need to have an understanding of the science underlying that fabulousness. A fabulous-looking map is worthless if it isn’t an accurate representation of reality.
I make a Google Image Search almost every day, and didn’t need any courses!
Acronyms, people. Spell them out in full at least once.
GIS = Geographic Information System.
Bijou Drains, you have 20 years of software development? In what? GUI’s or database work?
I’ve been in the GIS business since 1988. It was then called AM/FM. No, not in radio. Automated Mapping/Facilities Management.
I am now a GIS programmer/analyst for county government. When the rubber hits the road, and data is needed they come to my department. It’s pretty cool.
Understand that databases have to have some sort of commonality to be able to communicate. A common property. Say eggs for a database of recipes. BUT every thing including the for mentioned eggs do have a property that is common to everything else…
They have a location. Everything has a spatial component (except possibly ideas, except you could map those to the person that has them)
Honestly, some of the hardest part of the job is educating others in what it can do. People really, really don’t understand spatial analysis.
We’ve seen it on this board. “I want to drop Lat and Long on this map”. A fair enough request, but they could not follow up with the simple question “Why? What for?” A BIG part of my job is trying to find out the goal of the request. People often don’t know what spatial analysis can do, or what kind of map they want. Often the data just can be crunched into a table, and that’s all they need.
GIS is very hot now and has been for 20 years. It would be a good tool in your box. I’m not sure what kind of course or degree you are looking at, but in the end. It’s all just data. GIS is another component. And important one IMHO.
I do stat programming so it’s not hard core stuff like C++. I use SAS software but I am learning R and Python since those are now getting popular for stat analysis. I also use SQL to access databases such as Oracle. I deal with a lot of data in different formats , text , Excel, etc. I might do GIS as a part time job in retirement if anybody will hire me part time. 3 days a week would be ideal.
I should add I have always enjoyed looking at maps but have not worked with any in my jobs. I remember reading an interesting tidbit that map makers sometimes put fake towns on their maps to see if other companies are copying their maps. Don’t know if that is still done. I bet very few people know Michael Jordan’s BA degree is in geography. 
Hey, you just became my hero! As part of my retirement last year I decided to learn R, and among other things I have been making all sorts of maps with it. And I was staggered to discover how many shapefiles are actually available out there, in remarkable diversity, and how much time must have gone into making them available, mostly for free.
So thank you! Well, you and shapefile makers everywhere. 
I work in forestry and natural resources and use GIS everyday. Every student that gets a Natural Resource degree walks away from the college with a basic understanding of GIS. For example, I would expect any 2nd year community college forestry student to be able to identify all of the land in the county that has a south facing aspect, greater than 60% slope and is within 330 feet of a stream. I would expect them to be able to map it and get me the acreage. The difference between us on-the-ground users and the people that do it as a full time job is data management and analysis. If I’m paying someone to do only GIS, I want them to be able to utilize algorithms to identify urban trees from aerial photo raster data, or handle the data management and delivery for an office of 40+ users. In the first instance, I’m paying you to be at the forefront of the tech and in the second I’m paying you to be IT with GIS knowledge.