Part of the clients I had, had employees or managers, on the corporate team, who already knew how to use Excel or Google spreadsheets, even with intermediate skills. They understood that a statistician would allow them to make a quantum leap. In general, having a specialized, or verticalized, person in a field gives benefits.
The introduction above goes to refute those who say:
I already have those who use Excel in the company
I already have people who do analytics
I already have employees with “Excellent knowledge of the Office package.”
By the way, analytics essentially means descriptive statistics. And I have already explained that making decisions on these alone has risks. Because you throw away an important part of statistics.
A client of Enterprise Statistics initially sought an employee, to enhance CRM data. I quickly pointed out that a full-time contract for that job description is excessive. Such a request should come as no surprise: the statistician has existed for too short a time as a non-public administration profession, so most business owners and/or managers are not familiar with the tools used by that professional, nor with the workloads. In other words, to the vast majority of micro, small businesses, a full-time employee being a statistician lowers returns on investment (ROI). But this is not just a fiscal consequence of having an employee instead of an outsourcer. The statistician and the accountant have a similarity in this respect as well.
In general, medium and large companies have more reason to internalize a statistician. It is no coincidence that Enterprise Statistics is aimed more at SMEs, with Medium-sized companies defined only by a subjective criterion, “under 35 employees.” To my surprise, I discovered that a large pharmaceutical company, which developed a major vaccine known in the recent news, had completely outsourced its statistics department .
If you are interested in growing skills in house, meaning having employees, even if you do not fall into a medium or large company, you will obviously have more costs and risks: thinking that that skill will stay with you for a long time or long enough to make it back in costs, may be underestimating worker mobility. I invite you to consider that, especially in some countries, the most common way for employees to increase their gross annual income is to change companies every 2-3 years or so. This is particularly observed in the IT world, and in the data science one certain dynamics are no different.
Obviously, if you are looking for a person who does statistical programming in SAS, a language from the 1970s, I for one would tell you to find an employee who is certified.
However, if you write a job post seeking an employee by including skills from an entire department, you necessarily need an outsider. I also had a really extreme case of a company asking for skills from two departments: computer science and statistics. In that case you need to clear your head, or an exorcism, or go to one of those big companies that own skyscrapers.
Also consider that Enterprise Statistics needs about a month to get up to speed, that is, to know enough of the company’s data so that it can produce something useful, that has return on turnover/costs. An employee, who possibly has little experience with certain business dynamics, could easily require more.
The statistician will become an expected figure in all modern companies and clearly it will take some time to digest this because it turns out to be a “new” expense. New despite the fact that the owner already pays a fraction of at least one employee’s time for some statistical activity, e.g., descriptive statistics such as pivot tables on excel. Again, nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed: companies will spend more and more on statistical activities because there is already an understanding that the data must be processed. And the statistician allows you to make a qualitative leap in processing.
Do you already have an employee you want to partner with a statistical consultant like Enterprise Statistics? Or do you want to completely outsource your nascent statistics department? Let’s hear from you in a free call.