Who employs lecturers?

Obviously the primary recruiters of lecturers are universities!

Universities are divided into departments (sometimes called faculties, schools or divisions) that concentrate on the various subject areas. Some universities have specialist departments of statistics. In many, the statisticians form part of a larger and wide-ranging department of mathematics and statistics. Such a department might be called, say, "mathematical sciences" or just plain "mathematics", but will still treat statistics as a serious academic discipline. Statistics lecturers in such departments might find themselves called on to teach some mathematics classes as well as statistics ones.

Some universities also employ statistics lecturers in other departments such as those mentioned earlier - departments like biology, engineering and psychology. Here, the statistics lecturers concentrate on applications of statistics in that particular area, and the teaching is normally solely to students specialising in the area. Some statistics lecturers find it very stimulating to be closely involved with a major application area in this way. Others prefer to be located in a statistics department and reach out from there to the application areas.

Statistics lecturers are also extensively recruited by medical (and dental) schools. They are often called lecturers in medical statistics rather than just in statistics. It is very important that medics and dentists understand how to interpret the medical data that they collect. They also need to be able to interpret statistical results published by others as, for example, often occurs in reports on clinical trials of new methods of treatment and new drugs.

We also need to mention that lecturers, in statistics and in many other subjects, are recruited by further education colleges and similar institutions. This is usually a rather different sort of job and we are not really dealing with it in this part of our website. It is rather a hybrid situation, falling somewhere between school teaching and university teaching and having some of the characteristics of both. Research and consultancy are likely to be less important than in a university. Emphasis is more likely to be given to teaching, usually at a level somewhere above that of schools but not at the full level of a university degree.