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Statistics as a Career

Projected Demand for Statisticians

• CareerCast.com: Best jobs of 2017. Statistician is the top-rated job in 2017 accoding to CareerCast.
• Why Statistics?, Science Magazine, 6 April 2012.
  “Statistics is the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty; and it thereby provides the navigation essential for controlling the course of scientific and societal advances. This field will become ever more critical as academia, businesses, and governments rely increasingly on data-driven decisions, expanding the demand for statistics expertise.”
• What Are The Odds That Stats Would Be This Popular?, New York Times, 26 January 2012.
  “Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech's hottest calling.”
• Critical Shortage of “Data Geek” Predicted by 2018, TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, 28 June 2011.
  “New research forecasts a 50 to 60 percent gap between the supply and demand of people with deep analytical talent.”
• Why We Should Learn the Language of Data, Wired Magazine, 19 April 2010.
  “We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can't write, you can't think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar.”
• For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics, New York Times, 6 August 2009.
  “the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians”
• Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs., The Wall Street Journal, 6 January 2009.
  “Mathematicians land top spot in new ranking of best and worst occupations in the U.S.”
• Swift action needed to close the skills gap in bioinformatics, Nature, 2 September 1999.

Career Information

• Career Center. An excellent guide to careers in statistics. American Statistical Association.
• Career Development. Advice on career development from the Royal Statistical Society.
• Discover Data Science.
• What is Statistics? Case studies, short stories and example jobs from the Statistical Consulting Centre, University of Melbourne.
• Careers involving probability and statistics. University of Texas.

Statistics Careers in Australia

There is currently a very marked shortage of professional statisticians across a range of disciplines in Australia. The hottest areas are biostatistics/bioinformatics and financial modelling, but more traditional areas such as survey designs are also feeling the pinch. Advertisements for biostatisticians are going unfilled for a long time. The methodology division of the Bureau of Statistics reports that the output of honours graduates in statistics is no longer sufficient to fill its annual recruitment needs. The need for statisticians is more recognized than even before in Australia and there are far more employment opportunities than ever before. There are several jobs for every honours graduate that Australia is producing. It is very difficult to understand why the number of graduate statisticians being produced by Australian universities is not larger than it is.

Some idea of the range of employers in Australia and NZ can be had by browsing the recent job announcements. The job announcements site also allows you to search for all jobs over the past couple of years advertised by a particular employer.

General Resources

• Tomorrow's Professor. Advice and information for students beginning their academic career in science and engineering. Stanford University Learning Laboratory.
• Simply Statistics. A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng and Jeff Leek.