Rachel Hilliam, statistics professor at The Open University, used her inaugural lecture this month to make “a real plea” to the data science community “for outreach into schools”, to help build excitement and awareness of the promise and potential for careers in data science.
“We have a plethora of jobs that we cannot fill in data science at the moment,” said Hilliam. “We’ve had all sorts of initiatives in terms of trying to retrain people, and that’s great, and those are gaps that we need to plug. But unless we get that pipeline coming through, we’re always going to have this problem at the top.”
Hilliam, who is chair of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals, wants schoolchildren and teachers to be made more aware of the benefits of, and opportunities for, data science careers. “Let me tell you,” she said, “if you go out into a school and say, ‘Do your kids want to be a data scientist?’, the teachers will look at you and go, ‘A what?’. They have no idea, generally, that data science actually exists, which is a shame.”
But there are plentiful opportunities to introduce data science to children, Hilliam suggests. She began her talk by saying that: “Data is everywhere – in every single thing that we do, in all of our walks of life.” And she concluded by saying: “Whatever it is that these kids are interested in, […] there is lots of data out there, so there is absolutely no reason why we can’t excite children in a career in data science. So, that’s where I’d like to finish. Go out and talk about data science, particularly to schoolchildren!”
Watch the lecture in full below or on YouTube. Skip to 17:04 for the start of the talk.
- Copyright and licence
- © 2023 Royal Statistical Society
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International licence. Thumbnail photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.
- How to cite
- Tarran, Brian. 2023. “‘Go out and talk about data science, particularly to schoolchildren.’” Real World Data Science, July 27, 2023. URL