Statisticians have strong prospects of developing a career across many streams, as the demand for analysing and interpreting the vast amounts of data available to the fields of government, commerce and research continues to rise. If you have a good Bachelor degree in mathematics, statistics or operations research then you have a great opportunity to pursue further graduate study in courses at the Master of Science (MSc) or Doctorate (PhD) level.

Graduate statistics courses are the pathway to an exciting profession with a rapidly increasing remit. We are living in an increasingly data-dependent society in which it is impossible not to engage with data. More and more professions, from the everyday to the exotic, depend on data and numerical reasoning. Data is not just numbers, but numbers that carry information about a specific setting and need to be interpreted in that setting. Where is the new data society leading us? With the growth in the use of data comes a growing demand for the services of statisticians, although, as stated by the Royal Statistical Society, there is a lack of statisticians across all areas of applications in the UK and internationally.

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. … The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades… Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."
(Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Google's chief economist, in The McKinsley Quarterly, Jan 2009, )

"I am not much given to regret, so I puzzled over this one a while. Should have taken much more statistics in college, I think. :)"
(Max Levchin, Paypal Co-founder, Slide founder)

The demand for statisticians is high and the opportunity to develop skills gained as an undergraduate at a higher level means that you have a very marketable qualification in a concentrated field of expertise.

Masters/Graduate Programmes

The UK Committee of Professors of Statistics website lists over 20 graduate statistics courses in the UK. Statistics MSc courses involve lectures and exams with coursework and writing a substantial dissertation. One of the outcomes from writing a successful MSc dissertation might be to be awarded funding and carry on research, perhaps in a new topic, to a higher level towards a PhD. The subject areas for graduate statistics courses usually reflect the special research expertise in a department. For example at the University of East Anglia these are financial/insurance statistics, medical statistics and knowledge discovery.

PhD Programmes

If you are applying for a PhD, then it's a good idea to declare your interests and read about the lecturers’ expertise in areas in which they might supervise you. Again, to look at at the University of East Anglia these are multivariate copula-based statistical methods widely used in finance and insurance, survival analysis and  meta analysis used in medical and social sciences, statistical genomics.  To study for a PhD requires commitment and passion to do research, but there is nothing more interesting than discovering something new and exciting. 

Achieving a graduate qualification in statistics can put you on a strong career trajectory. The range of sectors you would have the opportunity to work in is vast, ranging across insurance, banking, government, business, market research, retail analysis, sport, health and medicine, the pharmaceutical industry to name but a few. The technical abilities that you develop at post graduate level combine strongly with the analytical, communication and solution-based skills to give you an attractive qualification in today’s competitive world.

With thanks to:

Prof Elena Kulinskaya
School of Computing Sciences
University of East Anglia

For providing this article on graduate statistics courses.