What are careers in statistics?

Financial analysts, statisticians, and software engineers are careers in statistics. Here are details on each of the careers and others in statistics:

• Financial Analyst

A financial analyst is a professional that analyzes past and current trends to help create a better financial future for a company or client.

Financial analysts may use financial reports created by accountants to help give guidance to a company in how best to use its resources. Their main objective is to investigate data to identify business opportunities or give investment plans. Senior financial analysts tend to focus on devising investment recommendations more than anything else.

• Statistician

Statisticians examine specific sets of data and apply business models to them. They study and try to solve organizational issues in a company through the use of statistics. Once they have determined which data they need to resolve a specific issue, they utilize surveys and different kinds of experiments to gather information.

Statisticians use industry-standard concepts in their analyses but also might create new theories, rules, and models if necessary.

Once a statistician is done with their analysis, they translate the new information they've learned into reports for executives at their companies to help with decision-making and strategy options.

• Software Engineer

A software engineer designs, develops, maintains, tests, and evaluates computer software and other software products.

Their tasks include implementing technical designs, improving and maintaining existing code bases, reviewing code changes, writing new codes for applications, identifying issues with the software, and coordinating the installation of the software for clients.

• Data Scientist

A data scientist is a tech professional that aims to get insights from structured and unstructured data. They review figures and statistics to try and gain insights and come to conclusions.

They also write high-level code with Python or R, and they often use BI tools for data analysis and visualization. Data scientists are considered builders. They are tasked with analyzing and understanding specific business problems, feature engineering, developing, selecting, and tuning models. And then generating insights to present to stakeholders.

• Data Engineer

Data engineers have duties like gathering data sets that line up with business goals and needs, creating algorithms to transform data into valuable information, and creating, testing, and maintaining database architectures.