Published on 17 July 2024

«Becoming a student again at the age of 40? My best career decision!»

After a professional reorientation, Monika Allemann now works as a specialist for information systems at swisstopo.

© Adrian Moser Photography

In the course of her professional life, Monika Allemann has worn several hats. She started out as a secretary, then worked in a bar, and subsequently became a teacher and school principal. A fairly typical early career path for a woman, she says. But then at the age of 40, she decided to follow her aspirations. She resigned from her position as school principal and attended university, where she studied geography.

Her decision to do this did not mean she wanted to make a clean sweep of the past. On the contrary, she initially envisaged returning to her former profession after obtaining her degree in geography. She went on to imagine working as a teacher at a high school. This offered her a certain degree of continuity that enabled her to approach her studies more calmly and remain confident for the future.

However, from the first year of her Bachelor’s, she quickly realised that the path she had taken would lead her elsewhere. She is still astonished today that she only discovered at such a late stage the potentials she had been entirely unaware of before. She discovered a new way of understanding the world, getting things organised and accessing information. Her perspectives underwent a radical change.

I am very happy that it is now more natural for young women to discover technical and scientific disciplines and to flourish in them.

Monika Allemann, geographic information systems specialist

Much to her surprise, she found that highly technical and scientific work gave her a strong sense of self-fulfilment. As someone who believed she was more adept at working with people, she unexpectedly found herself fascinated by geomorphology and climatology. Her decision to go to university had profoundly changed the course of her professional life. After obtaining her Master’s, she joined swisstopo for an internship within the Coordination of Geoinformation Services section. With this move, she found herself at the beginning of her second career.

Geographic information systems (GIS) have become an essential instrument in the field of geography in that they facilitate the collection, management and analysis of geodata. And this is precisely where Monika Allemann is in her element. Through the use of GIS, she coordinates various data in order to present them in a spatial context. She combines different types of information to represent them visually in a spatial environment. In this way, she processes diverse and often complex information to make it more easily accessible, whether on a map or a web application, for example.

And this is what she finds so rewarding: apart from mastering the various computer languages and technical challenges, her choice of graphics enables her to transform complex data into a tangible and specific document. In this way, she facilitates exchanges and communication and thus provides a reliable decision-making instrument.

Monika Allemann is currently responsible for the operation and development of ImmoGIS, which is a web application that permits the visualisation of the data and real estate requirements of armasuisse. Monika Allemann works at the GIS Service Centre, where a team of 9 employees (5 of whom are women) provides services in the field of spatial representation for armasuisse.

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