The career of the future: Statistics
From a McKinsey Quarterly Interview with Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian (courtesy of FlowingData):
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, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. 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.
In high school, I took mathematical modeling instead of calculus. The mathematical modeling course exposed students to spreadsheets and predictive models. My father had introduced me to Lotus 1-2-3 some time before and I was already hooked on data, so this course was truly exciting for me.
I remember finding historical records of gray wolf, elk and deer populations on Vancouver Island, BC, and identifying correlations between their growth and decline and weather patterns. I recall building a model that described the relationship between the sun and the temperature of the earth’s surface at sunrise and sunset. This one semester class gave me more foundational blocks for my business career than any college course (with the possible exception of accounting).
While the models we were building may have described timber growth or human populations, the skills I learned enabled me to build business models and, later, create GuildQuality. So clearly, I am biased, but I enthusiastically echo Varian’s sentiments.
