Education in official statistics: A common challenge of providers of official statistics and universities

Abstract

In the fast-changing environment, the amount of available data is exploding and transforming it quickly into actionable information is not easy. Thus, reliable and comparable statistics are in increasingly high demand by the public, even more so in troubled times such as financial crisis and pandemics. However, crisis is also an exciting opportunity to tap into the interest of young people and harness their talent for working with official statistics. Two initiatives at the European level are already in place to advance education in official statistics. As production environment started to change with increasingly rapid evolution of technologies and new data sources, Eurostat together with the European Statistical System (ESS) brought to life European Statistical Training Programme (ESTP) and European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS). This papers briefly describes the origin and the main characteristics of both models of training, the bridges that they build, and discusses the way ahead.