7th EMOS workshop ‘Unlock the future of EMOS: why over what, experimenting over execution’, 29 June 2021, online
The seventh EMOS workshop gathered around 80 participants from 30 countries: statistical producers, teachers, graduates and students. The focus of the discussions were skills, impact of the digital transformation on official statistics, employability and communicating facts to an ‘actively uninterested’ audience. The participants agreed that, to work effectively, teams producing and disseminating official statistics nowadays require a broad range of skills, including hard competences for computer science – with R, Python and visualisation scoring high - statistical processes and methodologies combined with soft skills for communication, project management, creativity and problem solving. In other words, there is a need for multidisciplinarity in teamwork and an effective dialogue between users, producers and IT specialists.
The opening panel highlighted the European dimension of EMOS, the need to modernise our statistical tool kit for the future and further develop services for networking of key actors to improve, for example, access to jobs for graduates. The ESS and ESCB would also benefit from extending traineeship and job offers to users and partners in co-producing official statistics.
Employability was discussed in two panels. The first one looked at the motivation to choose EMOS and how useful EMOS studies are in finding jobs for four recent EMOS graduates who now work in official statistics (INSEE), the private sector (transport company), international organisations (UNSD) and in academia (LMU München).
The second panel with colleagues from Destatis, FAO and the Bank for International Settlement discussed what producers can offer for EMOS graduates and what makes the difference for working as official statistician: working for the public good by being close to policymaking and help finding answers with high quality data are values that stand the test of time.
Finally, afternoon’s keynote speaker Jo Røislien explained how to communicate to an ‘actively uninterested’ audience about facts.
Recordings