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When I was a graduate student back in the dark ages, I took an advanced statistics course and then briefly worked in a laboratory where statistical analysis of data derived from animal models of disease (in this case the guinea pig model of tuberculosis) were essential. After leaving that lab, I developed an appreciation for the power of statistics (when appropriately designed according the laws of parametric statistics) and actually used statistical analyses of in vitro data for my PhD thesis. Unlike me, most of my contemporaries never understood statistics and thought that statistics can be used to manipulate data to confirm any hypothesis put forth by an investigator.

Imagine my surprise when I read in today’s NY Times that statistics are one of the hottest new career opportunities in technology and related industries. This is because billions of bytes of data (aka "big data sets")are generated daily and someone (usually a statistician or a person with knowledge of some arcane statistical analyses) is regarded to tease out trends and interpret the data. Companies like Google, Facebook, as wells as marketers, risk analysts, spies and companies that engage in competitive intelligence are desperately seeking new employees who understand applied statistic, analytics and trend analysis.

According to a recent LinkedIn survey, from 2009 to 2011 the number of new jobs with titles related to analytics grew 53%. Unfortunately, there are not enough trained or qualified persons available to fill these positions at most of these companies. Because of workforce shortages, universities like Stanford, Harvard and North Carolina State (NC State) have created graduate programs to train students in statistics and advanced analytics. 

Ninety per cent of NC State advanced analytic students (a 10 month program created in 2006) annually found jobs. The average graduate’s starting salary for an entry-level job is $73,000. Stanford and Harvard statistics department graduates head to Google, Wall Street and in many instances bioscience companies and start with salaries of over $100,000.

Not surprisingly, competition for entry to these programs is getting fierce. NC State takes only 40 new students per year in its program (185 applicants last year). Moreover, this year, Stanford received over 800 applications for 60 openings in next’ years class; nearly twice the number of applications that it received three years ago.

Like it or not “big data” and analytics are de rigueur and persons with advanced analytics training may be the new rock stars. That said if you like statistics or love to look for trends in large data sets then a career in analytics may be right for you. Now, you have to figure out where to get the training.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!.

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By now, most people have heard that the average national unemployment rate has fallen from close to 9.0% to 8.6%—the lowest in almost three years. While this may be cause for celebration, a closer inspection of other statistical findings is necessary to get a real picture of American unemployment (notwithstanding the fact that unemployment rates for African Americans and Hispanics are in double digits).

The source of these revealing stats was an article by Phyllis Korkki published in the New York Times this past New Year’s Day entitled “The Year of the Multitaskers’ Revenge” According to Ms. Korkki, while the overall unemployment rate is 8.6%, the jobless rate for persons who earned a college degree is 4.4% while the rate for those with a high school diploma is 8.8%. The unemployment rate for those individuals who did not graduate from high school is a staggering 13.2%. However, a more troubling statistic offered by Ms. Korkki is that less than 30% of United States population of 25 years or older has a bachelors or higher degree. To make matters worse, 30% of jobless Americans have been unemployed for a year or more.

Ms. Korrki contends that large groups of American will continue to be unemployed or underemployed unless more training and educational opportunities become available to the public. Further she asserts that if the long term unemployed do not get some government help than this groups risks falling so far behind that it will never be able to catch up.

Most analysts predict that unemployment rates in the US will remain high for five years or more. Like Korkki, I believe that the only way to reduce unemployment among non-college graduates is to fund programs that are designed to retrain workers for jobs in emerging technologies. Further, bringing manufacturing jobs from overseas back to the US will also help!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!!!

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Much has been written about the emerging markets in China. While there are likely thousands of business article and white papers on China’s economic expansion, I was unable to find a single source that provided me with some vital economic and social statistics to explain China’s rise as an economic power; that is until I received OnWisconsin, a quarterly publication from my alma mater the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An article entitled “Delicate Balance” by Jenny Price ’96 provided me with a plethora of data that cogently and expertly explained the Chinese ascendancy as an economic power. Not surprisingly, the data offered by Price was compared with economic, social and business data from the US. Some of the information was startling to say the least (bold italics); so here goes:

Urban Population

United States 82%

China 47%

Median Age

United States 36.9 years

China 35.5

Total Fertility Rate

United States 2.06 children born per woman

China 1.54 children born per woman

Infant Mortality Rate (death per 1,000 live births)

United States 6.06

China 16.06

Net Migration Rate

United States 4.18 migrants/1,000 population

China -0.33 migrants/1000 population

Largest City

United States New York/Newark 19.3 million

Shanghai 16.6 million

Imports/Exports

United States $1.903 trillion/$1.27 trillion

China $1.307 trillion/$1.506 trillion

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by Sector

Agriculture

United States 1.2%

China 9.6%

Industry

United States 22.2%

China 46.8%

Services

United States 76.7%

China 43.6%

External Debt

United States $13.98 trillion

China $406.6 billion

Public Debt

United States 58.9% of GDP

China 17.5 % of GDP

Budget Revenues/Expenditures

United States $2.092 trillion/$3.397 trillion

China $1.149 trillion/$1.27 trillion

Population (2011 estimate)

United States 313,232,044

China 1,336,718,015

Literacy (ages 15 or older or can read and write)

United States 99%

China, 91.6%

Life Expectancy at Birth

United States 78.37 years

China 74.68 years

After reviewing the data, it became much more apparent to me as to why so many companies, most notably pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, are investing heavily in the Chinese market. Financial analysts predict that the Chinese pharmaceutical market will surpass the US (currently the world’s largest) by the end of the decade. That said, I think it may be time for the American public to learn more about China. Learning as much as possible about the competition is essential if you want to stay in the game.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!!!!

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While ‘women in the workplace’ is no longer a new or novel concept, there are still differences in the way women and men are viewed and treated at work. Lauri Buckley at Job Profiles alerted me to an interesting article that they prepared entitled “The Gender Gap: 10 Surprising Stats on Women in the Workplace."

Listed below are some startling stats about women in the workplace. 

1.  Women comprise 46% of the total U.S. labor force. With almost half of the workforce being women, female employees aren't exactly a rarity. For most women today, getting a job is an expected part of life. This is a big change from past decades. In 1900, fewer than 20% of women participated in the labor market while today the number is around 75% and growing.
2. Women make only 77.5 cents for every dollar that men earn. This figure comes from data on the 2003 census. Despite this gap, many economists feel that the gap between pay for men and women is due to different personal choices men and women make about personal fulfillment, child rearing and hours at work. Whichever you choose to believe, the reality is that the gap is slowly but surely closing as women become increasingly educated and dual income families become the norm, but this isn't much consolation to those who feel discriminated against today.
3. The more education a woman has, the greater the disparity in her wages. This certainly doesn't mean women should shy away from professional positions, but they should be aware that they may have to battle harder for equal pay. Women in professional specialty occupations were found to earn just 72.7% of what men in the same position earned, and women in upper level executive, administrative and managerial occupations earned even less at 72.3%. If you compare this against the average of 77.5%, the numbers speak for themselves, and this graphic from the New York Times makes it even easier to see.
4. Women may work longer to receive the promotions that provide access to higher pay. One example provided by the National Center for Education Statistics shows that women often have to work three years longer in a teaching position to be promoted to a principal than their male counterparts. Some studies suggest that this is because women and men adapt different strategies when it comes to management and pursuing promotions, yet other studies connect it less to work and more to gender-based biases.
5. Women business owners employ 35% more people than all the Fortune 500 companies combined. If you're like most people, you don't picture a woman when you think about a business owner. Yet there are about 9.1 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., a number that comprises nearly 40% of all businesses. The idea that women don't make good managers just doesn't hold up when you look at these kinds of numbers, with women managing a large number of employees and making healthy profits while doing so.
6. Women account for 46% of the labor force, but 59% of workers making less than $8 an hour. What does it mean? It means that many women are taking on jobs that pay well under a living wage. With nearly 16% of U.S. households having women who are divorced, widowed or never married as the sole providers, this leaves many women at a distinct disadvantage and struggling to make ends meet as they dominate jobs in low paying fields.
7. Only 53% of employers provide at least some replacement pay during periods of maternity leave. Despite the fact that the arrival of a child means extra bills and expenses, many employers don't provide women with any benefits if they to leave work temporarily to have a child. While there is no law requiring companies to offer paid maternity leave, considering it is an issue that primarily affects women, it's certainly a blow to their income potential and ability to care for their families and themselves.
8. Four in ten businesses worldwide have no women in senior management. This shouldn't be a surprise given the way many countries feel about women in the workplace. Here in the United States, however, women still feel the stress of trying to break into upper management, with 93% of the 439 senior women executives surveyed by Korn/Ferry International in 1992 feeling that a glass ceiling for women still existed. Yet new studies report that women outnumber men as managers in fields like human resources, health administration and education--perhaps stemming from reports that many businesses have seen a direct financial impact from hiring women.
9. Women earned less than men in 99% of all occupations. In virtually every field that women choose to enter, they can expect to earn less over their lifetime than their male counterparts. This means that over 47 years of full-time work, this gap amounts to an estimated loss in wages for women of $700,000 for high school graduates, $1.2 million for college grads, and $2 million for professional school grads--a staggering amount.
10. Minority women fare the worst when it comes to equal pay. African-American women earn 64 cents to every dollar earned by white men and Hispanic women just 52 cents per dollar. Whether it's attitudes about race or gender that are at play, it's clear that something needs to be done to level the playing field.

While these interesting statistics may be new to a lot of men, women have long known about the biases and inequities that they face in the workplace. The facts presented in the article suggest that while women have come a long way in the past 40 years, there is still a lot of work that must be done to achieve parity between women and men in the workplace.

Hat tip to Job Profiles!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!

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Much has been written about social media but who has time to ponder all the analytical data to come up with trends and cool statistics? 

To that end, I was reading Dec/Jan edition of Forbes Small Business (FSB) magazine and I came upon some random social media tidbits that I thought were worth sharing.  I cannot vouch for the veracity of the information but sources were cited to confirm the facts.

35% of Americans 18 and over used social media of some type in 2008; only 8% were involved with social media in 2005 (source: Pew Internet and American Life Project)

95% of business decision makers worldwide use social networks (source: Forrester Research)

Of 2000 recent tweets that were analyzed by Peer Analytics:

• 4% were spam
• 6% were self promotional
• 9% were “moderately interesting”
• 38% were conversational
• 43% were “babble”

Finally (and not surprisingly):

87% of adults said they prefer dealing with others in person instead of via computers or smart phones (source: Centralvalleybusinesstimes.com)

I am not sure what it all means but I figured the info was worth a shout out.

Hat tip to FSB!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Networking

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I have previously written several posts on the reluctance of life scientists to use social media and online social networking sites. While I realize that scientists may be somewhat socially challenged, the almost universal disdain for social media is puzzling and troubling to me. More importantly, the reluctance of life scientists to embrace social media flies in the face of some revealing new statistics on social media use by the American lay public.

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, “half of online adults now belong to social networks like, Facebook and Linked In, a 46 percent growth rate year-over-year.” More importantly, almost a quarter of Americans are content creators who write blogs, upload video or audio or post articles online.” Interestingly, the growth of social media is being driven by adults 35 and older. The survey found that four of five adults of all ages use social media including blogs, social networks and review sites. Finally, most adults visit social networking sites, in way or another at least monthly.

Many scientists who I have talked with (mostly graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) primarily use social media to stay in touch with friends or “hook up” with others after laboratory hours are over. And, other scientists—mostly laboratory heads and principal investigators—view social media as a colossal waste of time. Unfortunately, the scientists who underutilize or shun social media don’t understand its hidden potential to advance scientific research and perhaps more importantly to interact with the lay public to demystify “science.”  In my experience social media has been a powerful way to disseminate information and quickly reach large numbers of people. Isn’t this what science is really about?    

Until next time....

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!!!!!

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