Connie Sloots has been working for HERE, and its parents and grandparents, for 20 years. It’s a remarkable record of service and we’re enormously thankful for her work.
But more interestingly for our readers, it’s rare to meet someone who can accurately describe how HERE and the digital mapping business in general have evolved over two decades.
So we asked her about it and her career as a mapmaker.
“I was born in Geldrop, in The Netherlands, and was educated at a creative and technical school called Sint Lucas that specialised in media, design and communication,” Connie begins.
“I worked for nine years as an illustrator and designer for an agency that specialised in technical documentation – user manuals, product presentations and so forth for big industrial clients.”
“After they went bust, I was sent along to E.G.T. by a temp agency – they were looking for people with a graphics background.”
And that’s where Connie got started in digital mapping. E.G.T. (European Geographic Technologies) was a company set up by the Dutch electronics giant Philips, which needed digital maps with navigation for an early in-car system called CARiN. The office became part of HERE over the course of time.
The process of creating digital maps 20 years ago was just a little trickier than it is today, with no LiDAR, GPS still very crude, aerial maps made from planes rather than satellites and a heavy reliance on existing paper resources.
The jobs and roles have changed enormously since 1994.
“We had an ‘aerial specialist’ who was in charge of identifying the best aerial maps for our purpose. Then a ‘plotter’ who printed them out on enormous rolls of paper,” Connie says.
“Sorry, rainforests!” she adds.
“Then there was a job called ‘the pre-processor’ which involved marking the roads and land areas that needed to be digitised, by marking them with different coloured pencils on paper maps.”
“Then another person ‘the digitiser’ would create the map geometries by scanning and marking out aerial and topographic maps.”
There were a few other jobs that no longer exist. “We had a canteen lady, Carla, who was permanently employed to serve us food and hot drinks,” says Connie wistfully. “And a librarian to look after all these enormous paper maps.”
“That said, there’s also a lot of new jobs,” she continues. ”Back then, no one could have imagined the way in which our maps are now ‘alive’, with much more content and even dynamic data and the ability to answer lots of different questions.”
“The amount of information and attributes that we now apply to roads and locations is countless – and the more we add, the map becomes richer and more alive.”
“I think the Map Creator programme would have raised a few eyebrows back then, too. The idea of non-employees maintaining their own information on our maps would have been quite alien.”
Updates from the start
When Connie started, she worked in the update team – from the beginning, it was clear that our maps weren’t static creations. That, once created, it was time to start again. In addition, Connie worked on digitising newly built roads – “sometimes from plan drawings the size of a roll of wallpaper!”
When the company became Navtech, Connie moved to the field organisation for The Netherlands.
“This was the best time. We travelled the roads of Benelux looking for changes and new developments. We also gave support to field teams in Germany, Italy, Croatia, Turkey, Norway and even Australia. I got about.”
“I remember getting our first fieldwork kit. A big suitcase with a GPS antenna sticking out of the side. Inside was a massive laptop, a single camera and lots and lots of cables.”
“Times change. Now, we can collect a lot of the information that affects the map sitting at our desks.”
And what’s Connie’s job today?
“With a wide experience of different parts of the process, I wear a few different hats,” says Connie. “I am working with the Dutch National Parking Register. To ensure we have all parking locations correctly reflected in our map, we cooperate with local parties who have all this information. We are in constant communication about the best way of keeping the data up-to-date and ensuring we can also connect so called ‘rich-content’ information to these locations. In this way we allow information like prices, availability, opening hours, etc. to be connected to our parking locations.”
“Then I also participate in source data integration.”
“And I work with our expert users and our Map Creator communities.”
It’s quite unusual to work for the same company for such a long time nowadays. What made her stay?
“Actually, it doesn’t feel like I have worked for the same company. I’ve worked in lots of different departments, doing lots of different jobs for lots of different bosses.”
“It’s still a great company and I still love my job. That’s what matters,” she says with a twinkle.
