General overview

First, we should say that serious recruitment to the profession of statistician is usually at graduate or even post-graduate level. There are of course opportunities to enter a statistical career as a school leaver, perhaps as a statistical assistant, and work up through an organisation with on-the-job training. But most people get a degree first, and most organisations mainly recruit graduates.

You can study for a specialist statistics degree, or a joint degree featuring a substantial amount of statistics. Graduates from degrees of these types are likely to be able to enter statistical employment straight away.

Alternatively, you can study for a degree in some other subject and follow that by taking an MSc degree in statistics. This is also quite a common entry route into the profession. In fact, several employers expect or require their new recruits to study for an MSc and will often sponsor people to do this. Usually the other subject that you will have studied as an undergraduate will be quite strongly mathematical or scientific. Examples are mathematics itself or many of the science and engineering subjects. Some social science degrees (e.g. psychology) are also suitable for this route. For information about this route, please see our prospective postgraduates section.

More rarely, people take an undergraduate degree and then continue with research study leading to a PhD. This is likely to be essential if you want a career as a university lecturer, and might also be helpful in some other strongly research-oriented careers. On the whole, though, recruitment to the statistical profession does not normally require people to have PhD degrees.

Most, but by no means all, of the undergraduate degrees that we are talking about are strongly based in mathematics. So a good performance in A-level mathematics (or the equivalent in other examination systems) is likely to be an entry requirement. This is so important that we feel we should highlight this advice at this early stage:

For most degrees leading towards a career in statistics, you need to study and do quite well at A-level mathematics (or the equivalent in other examination systems).