There are many types of statistics career opportunities for people with degrees in this discipline. Though statisticians are employed in some places after receiving an undergraduate degree, statisticians with advanced degrees are more sought after and often better prepared for one or more of the various positions available. Statisticians may be employed in a variety of different industries, but the most common statistics career opportunities are in the fields of business and industry, health care, and governmental organizations. In many cases, statisticians will specialize in a certain area of statistics in order to better prepare themselves for these different types of careers.
In business and industry, statistics career opportunities can be found in many fields, including manufacturing, finance, insurance, and computer science. These statisticians may design studies or experiments to determine what kind of reception a new product might expect in a given marketplace. They may also examine trends to determine potential areas for growth in a company. In insurance, statisticians work with complicated equations that help develop insurance rates based on previous patterns of behavior. In business, statisticians may develop algorithms that help predict which investments are likely to be profitable.
The field of health and medicine also provides many statistics career opportunities. Clinical trials use statistics in order to determine how effective new drugs are, and statisticians may be involved in both designing a trial and in interpreting the results. They may also work in the field of psychology, examining and quantifying aspects of human behavior. These types of careers often require a knowledge of both statistics and medicine or psychology, so many of these statisticians will have specialized in medical or biological statistics, taking classes related to both of these fields.
Government organizations employ statisticians in a number of different ways. They may be experts who offer advice or interpretations of data, or pollsters who determine trends in public opinion. Statisticians are often employed in jobs in which they are asked to make predictions based on a variety of different variables, including how certain populations have behaved in the past. Social and economic behaviors can also be statistically analyzed to determine if there is a cause and effect relationship between two different events. Some statistics career opportunities are also found in ecology, and many statisticians work on projects that evaluate the current or future state of the environment in a given area.