ESRI actually has some great online tutorials. Many of their webinars are free (http://training.esri.com/gateway/index.cfm?fa=search.results&cannedsearch=2). Check out their intro classes, their "tips and tricks" courses, and how to edit.

Yes ESRI has a virtual campus that will allow you to learn a great deal with their free courses as well as a number of pay courses that you can work towards certificates. All the courses also usually will give you a 60 day temp version of the software to use.

If you don't want to go the ESRI route look at IDRISI from clark University they have a very affordable software with many bells and whistles included in the software.

A useful resource to go look at is www.freegis.org they have information about free resources including full software packages. The most known of the free GIS is GRASS this was developed by the government and is still used in some circles. Many of these free resources include tutorials to help. SO between software and a good book that you like you can get a long way in your introduction to GIS.

A lot of this is going to be dependent on your PC skills and your ability to apply what you learn to other fields. I would also check out www.csanet.org They have a number of good articles and even an online publication.

Good luck.

There's a lot of good information online and you can always pick up some intro to Geography/GIS books. You can also get a free, 60 day demo of ArcGIS sent to you from ESRI at http://gis.esri.com/emails/av93dvd/index.cfm (if you have friends order them, you can keep 'em coming for awhile).

I think you can probably learn a lot if you're diligent. If you already have a decent familiarity of MS Access (ESRI geodatabases use it as a foundation), can handle SQL/VBASIC queries, have taken an intro to Geography course (have a basic understanding of projections), and have taken a college statistics course, then the rest will be easy.

For what it is worth ESRI offers a student version for those enrolled in an ESRI formatted class, ie. Intro to GIS101 at your local J.C./Univ.? The student license is only good for year and there are limitations, such as not being able to run certain statistical functions with your data. But if you want to help yourself interface with the program informally to start I suggest crashing an intro class where there might be a student copy first visit. I however have never participated in such an activity and am not sure how well such an undertaking would play out. Best of luck.

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. I had forgotten that ESRI has some free online tutorials as well as the online course. I may check into that in addition to some of the other stuff.

KB, how familiar with VB / SQL would you say is necessary to do well at this? Or more to the point, how complicated is that to learn? I've avoided it mostly, because we have someone else to handle most of our GIS and Access stuff, and I haven't really had the time to pick it up, but if familiarity with it is a necessity for GIS knowledge, I may need to look into it.

[quote:="KidCharlemagne"]Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. I had forgotten that ESRI has some free online tutorials as well as the online course. I may check into that in addition to some of the other stuff.

KB, how familiar with VB / SQL would you say is necessary to do well at this? Or more to the point, how complicated is that to learn? I've avoided it mostly, because we have someone else to handle most of our GIS and Access stuff, and I haven't really had the time to pick it up, but if familiarity with it is a necessity for GIS knowledge, I may need to look into it.

It's really not terribly difficult and not necessarily essential. In GIS, people generally specialize in one of three categories: Cartography, Spatial Analysis/Database, and Programming (AJAX, JS, etc.). I basically am the GIS department where I work and I think 90% of what I do is just general cartography; digitizing site maps, putting together orthos & DRGs, make figures for reports, etc. More than anything, this just requires familiarity with the software (ArcView and AutoCAD Map) and some knowledge of cartographic design (this was actually one of the hardest courses I took in grad school).

If you're fairly comfortable with Access, learning to manipulate queries in ArcGIS will be pretty easy. You can actually get away with manually manipulating and selecting entries in an attribute table (treating it like a spreadsheet) in an edit session but it's a lot easier to write queries and scripts. In ArcView, if you open an attribute table and use the "Field Calculator", you query in VB but if you use the "Select by Attribute" tool, it uses SQL.

There are situations where you absolutely have to use scripts. Last month, one of our clients gave us transit data to indicate their project boundary. It was in a giant text file (luckily it was projected coordinates), with about 5,000 points and their N/E coordinates. Unfortunately, the X/Y data was lumped together in a single attribute (ie, "N538099 E5411183"), so it was necessary to strip the text characters and then break up the numbers into separate fields. I can't imagine doing this manually. Depending on how your company's lab databases are setup, you run into similar issues.

I also have a script that we use for proposals that pulls up the applicable DEM, conducts a slope analysis, generates a point grid w/in the project area, and then conducts an overlay analysis. It does a pretty good job at indicating the number of STP's to plan for.

I'd recommend getting a demo copy of ArcView and just familiarizing yourself with it. Once you get comfortable with it, everything else will just seem like a natural progression.

My wife taught herself ArcView and has done some work using it and I have taught myself enough of it to get into trouble. I imagine it boils down to what you want to use it for and therefore how much you need to know. I don't see a lot of CRM folks using GIS beyond simply making maps for reports and integrating GPS information. There is some great stuff being done with GIS in CRM, but it isn't commonplace enough.

Prisoner's comments about CRM are true. The only caveat i would speculate is that the trend is that it is or will become more commonplace. Some states are now using GIS as their inventory management system for sites and even artifacts. Some states even require that CRM companies provide basic GIS data (not maps) to the state to manage sites. So there is a precedent for GIS as a management tool. So if you are looking to position yourself as an employee not to get rid of GIS may become a skill that will be more desirable by CRM firms in the near future