Statisticians work in various fields, from journalism to finance, and are needed to predict outcomes, analyze data, and create business models. They usually have a master’s or doctorate degree and rely heavily on computers. Governments and private sectors employ statisticians to track and analyze data for economic, medical, and industrial purposes.
A statistician is a person who works in the mathematical field of statistics. A statistician can specialize in applied or theoretical statistics. A statistician is needed in many different fields, from journalism to hard sciences and finance, and many people find it to be a lucrative career path. A statistician often works closely with an expert in a particular field to apply a statistical understanding when examining some aspect of that other field. For example, statisticians might work with medical researchers, funders, insurance agencies, government officials, or environmentalists to help them predict outcomes, analyze existing data, or create business models.
In the United States, there are approximately 20,000 people who identify as statisticians, and nearly half of them work for the government in some capacity. Although statistics can be studied in a university degree program, a professional statistician usually has at least a master’s degree in the field, if not a doctorate. Salaries for a statistician can vary widely, but are generally relatively high, and statistics is viewed as a professional white-collar field.
Statistical work has been around for thousands of years, with ancient empires using them to track things like their populations, taxes, and to keep track of important commodities like livestock. Whenever something needs to be quantified, modeled, and predicted, a statistician can be called in. As the world becomes increasingly reliant on a quantitative perspective, the statistician becomes an increasingly integral part of the workforce. In the modern world, a statistician usually relies heavily on computers to help them better model things and crunch numbers easily, as well as tracking data smoothly.
Governments tend to employ large numbers of statisticians because numbers are so important to the healthy functioning of a nation. Imports and exports need to be tracked and analyzed to understand our economic relationship with other countries; populations need to be tracked and examined to find trends in births, deaths and aging; crime needs to be analyzed to find underlying patterns that can help guide policies to reduce it; you need to watch the unemployment numbers to ensure a healthy economy with as robust a workforce as possible; and all policies reviewed by the government need to be subjected to heavy scrutiny to ensure that the numbers are in line with the language that guides the policy. No matter the country, a statistician is likely to play an important role.
In the private sector, many fields rely on statisticians, particularly the medical field and the many domains of industry. In medicine, new innovations are driven by research and development, which in turn depends on being able to track populations and see how different drugs or techniques affect them. To ensure these numbers have strong predictive power, a statistician needs to be involved, to help sort through the noise and find the real data. In industry, numbers help guide product refinement as well as cleaning up things like distribution channels to ensure costs are kept low and efficiency is high.
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