How come my Shapefiles don’t keep the symbol assignment?

The symbol assignment is not recorded in Shapefiles.  Suppose you have assigned various symbols to the Features in an iCMTGIS or iGPSGIS  job file. If you export the Feature data in Shepfile format then re-import data from the Shapefile, the Features will assume the default symbols.

When you save the Feature data in a .pmp job file, the symbol assignments will be preserved.