Remote Sensing Program Manager

Before the existence of bucket lifts, airplanes, and spaceships, the only way to get a bird’s-eye view of the world around you was to scale a tree or climb a mountain. Today, however, there are myriad ways to get a good view of your surroundings — and a Remote Sensing Program Manager knows them all.

As a Remote Sensing Program Manager, you lead a team that’s tasked with collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about remote landscapes, such as lakes, mountain ranges, forests, oceans, and even outer space. Together, you and your team — which might consist of Cartographers, Civil Engineers, Geographers, Geologists, Surveyors, and GIS Technologists, among others — use aerial photography, satellite images, global positioning systems (GPS), and geographic information systems (GIS) to measure an area’s size and shape, to gauge its surface temperature, to map its topographical features, and to determine its natural resources.

When you’re the Remote Sensing Program Manager, your emphasis is on management, oversight, and supervision. A Project Manager who handles three Ps — planning, prioritizing, and problem solving — you’re therefore responsible for managing schedules, budgets, people, and processes. In other words: Your team will usually do the actual data collection and analysis, but it’s up to you to make sure they do it accurately, on time, on budget, and with the right tools.

Under your direction, Scientists can study the effects of climate change on forests, Geologists can discover oil underneath the ocean floor, and Environmental Engineers can monitor pollution in lakes and rivers — all without the time, expense, and hassle of physically exploring difficult terrain.