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An interview with Erica Corbett, Esri Canada Certified Instructor

Published Date
Author Carole Arseneau

In this blog post, I want you to meet one of our Certified ArcGIS Instructors, Erica Corbett. Get to know Erica and learn what she likes about teaching ArcGIS. She also reveals the top five reasons why you should consider taking one of the courses she teaches in a short video.

How long have you worked at Esri Canada?

I started working in Vancouver as an Associate GIS Analyst in July 2018 after graduating from the Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS). My first year with the company involved work in multiple roles including Desktop Technical Support, Enterprise Technical Support, National Training and Consulting. I'm now the instructor for the Atlantic Region on the National Training Team, back in my hometown, Halifax.

What do you like most about teaching?

I enjoy connecting with people, building relationships and working directly with customers. I like hearing about the different ways our customers will apply the material from training in their daily work. As you can imagine, when teaching a GIS course, you get a huge variety of people from all different industries coming together. It gets interesting when you start seeing everyone collaborating in the classroom and learning from each other’s workflows.

Which course is your favourite to teach?

Migrating from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro is one of my favourites. This course brings lot of experienced users to the classroom. Often, attendees will bring very specific workflows and questions, which I like to dig into. It’s fun to see students’ surprise when they realize how fast ArcGIS Pro is, how much easier certain workflows are (for example, creating multiple layouts in a single project), how much the new tools improve on the old ones or the possibilities offered by working with 2D data alongside 3D data.

What’s a common concern that users have when migrating to ArcGIS Pro?

Migrating custom scripts built for ArcMap is always a concern. This is because ArcMap uses Python version 2, while ArcGIS Pro uses Python version 3. This is just one example of what we’ll cover in class to make your migration workflows simpler. If you’d like to learn more about the course, feel free to check out the following video on the top five reasons to register.

The course mentioned by Erica is available in our regular calendar in various time zones. Review details and offerings here and register now: Migrating from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro

If the dates and times offered don’t match your availability, please contact us to discuss other options.

This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.

About the Author

Carole Arseneau is a Market Research Specialist at Esri Canada. Over the years, she has advised customers from all industries on how to leverage GIS in their organizations. More recently, she’s been conducting market research to uncover details about the various jobs our customers do each day in various industries. This will help inform Esri Canada’s corporate strategy and better support our customers. Carole holds a Market Research certificate from the University of California, Davis, a GIS certificate from Florida State College in Jacksonville and a bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology from Laval University in Québec City. Being by the water has always made her feel at home and has given her inspiration to keep a positive outlook in life.

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