Preparing statistical consultants

Statistical consultants often play the role of collaborators on grants and tenders. This means that they need to be trained in much more than just statistics. In particular, statistical consultants need to have experience with the processes for grant and tender applications, collaboration and reporting. However, unlike other researchers, statistical consultants also have to work with many individual clients, and juggle numerous projects often from very different areas and disciplines. Thus statistical consultants need a diverse knowledge of statistical methodologies, software, data and disciplines or content areas. These complexities have been recognised in a new statistical consulting subject within Swinburne University’s post graduate MSc (Applied Statistics). This challenge has been met with a mix of lectures presented predominantly by applied statisticians specialising in a variety of important areas (such as health, social studies, psychology, marketing and management), routinely working with data from sources such as medical registries, patient databases, online open access databases, telephone interview data and government survey/census data. Assessments involved both playing the client and responding to a client’s brief, while the exam included a tender application. This paper describes this subject as well as the feedback received from a small class of mostly online students after the subject first being offered.