My work varies a lot but I am coding a mapping job at present and I have done several in the past. I have done car dashboard GPS systems and a few similar to that but on the whole most of my work is nothing to do with maps. There is the OS as Mouse says which does employ quite a few people - no doubt each country has their own agency for doing the national mapping. There are a couple of aerial photography outfits one which is not very far from me. A lot of their work is translating the aerial info into 3D models like Saab etc. Another business which were hiring recently was the oceanographic and hydrology people making maps for shipping and no doubt submarines and whatever else they do - it sounded tempting but the pay wasn't very good on it tho and they were heavily into Microsoft products to do the job and used a lot of buzzword bingo to sell the role which is always a bad sign.
There are lots of design houses that have to make maps of land use, shopping centres etc but they are usually quite architectural in style. Building plans for fire escapes and numerous other dry CAD type maps. There are no shortage of maps being made and someone is being paid to do them but I dont think that barely any of them are fantasy or have a lot of artistic merit to them.
I did a small amount of work in the games industry and I dont think they use many off the shelf apps to make the maps within a game. Often they use a 3D game engine which incorporates the terrain editor, other times like the game I was tangentially involved in, they wrote their own game level designer for the game. The bar for getting into games is quite high and the prospect of using one of the apps we see here a lot is slim. Robbie has done some game engine maps on this site and they are the only ones where I think its close to the requirements for games companies. You can get some free game engines now tho and you can play with the editors within them to give them a go. Its going to be nothing like CC3 tho.
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