GIS careers in Morocco: the skills employers ask for

Behind the word "geomatics", two jobs. The surveyor measures, marks boundaries and checks: total station, GNSS, parcel plans. The GIS engineer builds databases, web maps and image analyses. Public competitions mostly recruit the first; the few private listings rather look for the second. Both produce the same thing: accurate geographic data.

Each column is a city where a local body — urban agency, utility, university — has opened a geomatics competition since 2012: 219 competitions in 30 cities, from Tangier to Dakhla. Casablanca has 19, Rabat 13, Agadir 12. Hover over a city in the chart: its column lights up. The other 84 come from national bodies that recruit for the whole country.

In 2012, only four cities had opened a geomatics competition: Settat, Al Hoceima, Taza and Ouarzazate. Then urban agencies and utilities followed, one by one, all the way to Laayoune and Dakhla. By 2026, there are 30. The map replays the dated notices, year by year; the chart counts the cities.

Why so many competitions? Because the city grows faster than its plans. Around Casablanca, built-up and impervious surfaces rose from about 73 km² in 1985 to 200 km² in 2022, according to the GLC_FCS30D land-cover map: almost three times as much. Every housing estate, every road must be surveyed, marked out, registered and entered into the zoning plan.

From 2022 to 2026, competitions devoted solely to geomatics offered 424 posts, 252 of them at the ANCFCC — land registry, cadastre and mapping. The pace has changed: 23 posts a year on average from 2015 to 2021, 85 from 2022 to 2025. The agency is extending land registration, more than a million hectares in 2025: it takes surveyors to measure those parcels.

We read one by one the 27 descriptions attached to competitions from November 2024 to October 2026: 21 for surveyors, almost all from urban agencies, and 6 for GIS engineers. The foundation is shared: digital mapping, photogrammetry and imagery, planning rules, each in 23 descriptions. GIS is named in 19 out of 27, ArcGIS in 13, QGIS in 6.

The urban-agency surveyor measures, checks and processes files: land tenure appears in 20 of 21 descriptions, CAD in 14. The GIS engineer builds systems: ArcGIS and QGIS in 5 of 6 descriptions, databases and SQL in 5, the web in all 6. No surveyor description asks for a database. Six descriptions show a trend, not a measurement.

In Kenitra, the urban agency asks its survey engineer to master drones, laser scanning, BIM and 3D GIS; knowledge of artificial intelligence is "a plus". In Rabat, a GIS engineer description published in 2025 asks for Python and AI models applied to spatial data. These are still only two descriptions out of 27: fieldwork remains the foundation, but the tools are changing.

These 27 listings are mostly about data: English is asked for in 13, remote sensing in 9, Python and AI in 7 each, QGIS in 6, ArcGIS in only 3. Elsewhere, the same trend: among 1,240 geospatial listings collected by GEO CAREERS from October 2025 to February 2026, Python appears in 27%, ahead of ArcGIS (12%) and SQL (9%).

Side by side, 27 public descriptions and 27 private listings. ArcGIS and CAD dominate the public side (48% and 56% of descriptions) but weigh little in the private sector (11% and 19%). English and AI go the other way. QGIS and SQL are asked for at the same level on both sides. On the map, the public sector recruits across the country; the private sector, around Casablanca.

The training exists. IAV Hassan II, in Rabat, trains engineers in geomatics and surveying; EHTP, in Casablanca, opened its GIS track as early as 1998. Universities keep adding master's programmes, from Marrakesh (geomatics and territorial management, accredited in 2025) to Beni Mellal (environmental geomatics). The State aims for 100,000 digital talents trained a year by 2030.