Statistician Job Responsibilities

By: Tonya Mead, PhD, MBA, M.Ed, Corporate Trainer and Behavioral Scientist

Statistician job responsibilities is eight of the Best 100 jobs in the America according to the 2022 U.S. News and World Report. What factors do workers consider when evaluating whether any job represents one of the best? Participants identify the following job characteristics: 

  • they offer a good wage, 
  • they are not mind numbing, 
  • they align with our talents, abilities and skills, 
  • they do not generate high levels of pressure and stress, 
  • they provide room for advancement, and 
  • they provide a reasonable work-life balance. 

The good news about working as a Statistician is that statisticians are needed across multiple industries such as: manufacturing, retailing, online, finance and banking, insurance, automotive, entertainment, food and restaurant, and agriculture; to name a view. Statisticians are also involved in the collection and interpretation of data for government purposes such as health, welfare, safety, social justice and environmental.

If you’ve sat around the dinner table for the past three years and held heated discussions almost leading to fist blows; the major topics among friends and family members may have been: mortality and survival statistics related to the Coronavirus; increases in petroleum, natural gas, food stuffs related to inflation, and the fluctuations of the unemployment and employment rates related to governmental stimulus packages, mandates and forced closures. The data by which politicians use to drive public policy as well as the data used by citizens to determine consumer purchasing behaviors were created, examined, analyzed, interpreted and reported upon first by a Statistician.

Statistician Job Responsibilities

The job responsibilities and duties of Statisticians do not vary widely. For instance, the Graduate Program at Northeastern University describes the daily work tasks of statisticians as the interpretation of demographic, health and environmental information, often presented in data files and tables.

Some often confuse statisticians with mathematicians. Why? Because both job responsibilities consider numbers, data, the manipulation, extrapolation, and interpretation of math concepts as their base. Maryville University has this to say, “while mathematicians are usually concerned with the abstract measurement of values and creating results through functional processing, statisticians prefer a more involved methodology.”

Statistician Job Responsibilities

Statistician job responsibilities, daily tasks and work requirements generally revolve around the following:

  • Gathering and/or web scraping, analyzing and interpreting data (nominal, ordinal, discrete, and or continuous)
  • Recognizing trends, anomalies, outliers, associations and relationships found in the data
  • Creating flowcharts, sequencing and processing systems for collecting units of data that can be grouped into meaningful categories
  • Informing key stakeholders of relevant highlights, implications with effective communication through different modalities (visual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and gestural)
  • Providing counsel, consultations and advisement regarding the implications for governmental, nongovernmental (nonprofit), private and public corporations, small businesses and individuals on actionable next steps and strategies
  • Utilizing the data to assist decision-makers in making decisions that can increase profits, lower costs, improve quality, enhance the customer experience and/or improve employee morale and/or productivity.

Dr. Mead, PhD, MBA, MA http://www.ishareknowledge.com is a consultant and blogger at http://edfraud.net specializing in human behavior, school and social psychology. She can be contacted at: tonya at ishareknowledge dot com