training to supply the demand

Training to Supply the DemandAuthor(s): Francis G. CornellSource: Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 40, No. 230 (Jun., 1945), pp. 167-171Published by: American Statistical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2280121 .

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TRAINING TO SUPPLY THE DEMAND*

BY FRANCIs G. CORNELL U. S. Office of Education

r no ASCRIBE to organized education a significant role in processes of matching people and jobs is to accept for education a utilitarian

purpose. This paper is prepared on the basic assumption that persons in various statistical occupations, regardless of how these occupations may be defined, may receive through formal schooling those educational experiences which will contribute directly toward effieciency of performance in an occupation. The proposition, in its simplest terms, is: To supply the needs of business, government, industry, and research in various fields, with the proper number of persons with the right amount and kinds of preparation. This involves two major, though not unrelated, approaches. One is providing an adequate.program of guidance. The other is securing continuous adaptation of the curriculum to vocational needs.

THE GUIDANCE PROGRAM

The occupation, "statistician," or "statistical worker," or whatever it might be called, represents no readily definable, unique field as is the case with some of the professions. Hence, there is not available as there is for some fields such occupational information as will help persons make occupational choices and as will assist others in planning programs of education and training.' Without a good statement of what an occupation is, it is futile to attempt occupational counseling with reference to it, not to mention to provide the right kind of training for it.

Experience with headway made in other fields suggests that what is important is not what the statistical occupations may be called, but what the persons do who are employed at them. For guidance pur- poses, a useful classification of statistical workers might be one in which statistical occupations were grouped in families differentiated as to types of duties performed and as to levels of performance required. Thus a person whose job required work with index numbers 90 per cent of his time on a difficulty level of "B" would be classed with another whose job was 90 per cent index numbers and also on a level of "B." Similarly, we might wish to class together two individuals working in

* A paper presented at the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, Wash- ington, D. C., December 27, 1944.

1 See, for example, U. S. Office of Education Guidance Leaflets on Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Jour- nalism, Pharmacy, Nursing, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Optometry and Osteopathy.

167



168 AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION-

such divergent fields as education and agriculture if both were engaged upon advisory and consultative responsibilities involving the broadest range of types of applications of statistical and biometric methods.

It would probably be best not to draw the distinction between what is to be included in statistical occupations, and excluded as lower-level clerical occupations, too far up the line, because experience is one of the best tests of occupational competence and we may expect more and more of our workers on professional and semi-professional levels to come up from the ranks as larger numbers of persons are required in work of this type.

Once the occupation is defined, other types of specific information regarding statistical workers of various sorts are needed to round out the picture for good supply and demand matching. Included would be the number of persons now employed in the various levels and fields, the current and probable demand or need in each, and also for each category; the specific tasks performed, special qualifications, amount and kind of general and special education required, schools and colleges where training may be received, opportunities for advancement, related occupational fields, earnings, and work conditions. Much headway has been made in this direction in some occupational fields. There appears to be no insuperable difficulty in doing the same for statistical occupations.

So much for determining the demand. Equally important is an ex- amination of the supply. In democratic society, at least under peace- time conditions, the individual has the freedom of occupational choice. It is the task of guidance to prepare the individual for the wisest possible choice not only through acquainting him with facts concerning occupations which are of interest to him, such facts as we noted before about statistical workers, but also, facts about hiihself. The latter calls for inventories of abilities, aptitudes and interests. With these, given a key to the attributes required of the particular statistical occupation, the individual, through the assistance of occupational counseling, is able to determine within limits whether or not he would be a square peg in a round hole. Guidance also consists of assistance in the selection of training courses and institutions, placement, followup of progress after placement, and such other measures as may be necessary to bring about optimum occupational adjustment. The guidance counseling is most frequently undertaken by persons not trained in statistical work. Counselors need specific facts on attributes required for statistical occupations.

The importance of all these matters cannot be overemphasized in our efforts to avoid planlessness in the development of educational



TRAINING TO SUPPLY THE DEMAND 169

programs. It is, of course, as true of many occupational areas as it is of statistics. There are untold amounts of economic waste as a result of persons on the job who are not adequately trained, and who should have had and who might have had proper training. There is likewise waste in time and money spent in pursuing educational preparation for some occupation in which employment is not subsequently secured. It is not enough to rationalize these educational misfits by calling upon the theory of formal discipline by crediting such education to general training. Many young men and women drift into occupational choices for which they axe not suited. The "washout" rate of professional schools and colleges is evidence of this.

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Much of what is needed for adequate guidance is needed for determining the character of training programs. Ideally a thorough program of guidance would automatically predetermine the character of training programs. If choices of careers are made upon careful analysis of the pertinent facts indicated above either among potential candi- dates for entrance into a given institution or among actual entrants at various stages in their progress through that institution, curricular offerings, courses and course content, can be determined by student need. Often students are forced into the mold of the curriculum. The curriculum should be molded to fit the students. In a sense, guidance may serve as a balance wheel in the control of supply and demand. As the demand decreases in certain fields, fewer individuals are selected for training in those fields and curricular offerings are withdrawn, and vice versa.

The major implications of the supply and demand problem to training may be summed up in the word "flexibility." This is a notion not too prevalent in the actual practice of planning educational programs whether for training statisticians or others. However, schools and colleges, during the past four years, have had some experience with the very fluid programming of training to meet demands of the war emergency. Much of this has involved acceleration and narrow types of training not considered adequate for long-term educational programs, but it illustrates the principle of educational adaptability to training needs. Many new courses, from those in quality control to those in electronics, were established virtually overnight. The curricular offerings in a given institution at one time differed radically from what they had been a few weeks before.2

2 Cf. Annual Report of the United States Comminsioner of Education for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1944.



170 AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION*

The idea of adapting instruction to needs suggests planning training in statistics, not upon logically organized subject matter, not upon the textbook or the course catalog, but upon a broad conception of needs of the individual. There is a vast realm of uncertainty or uncontrolled variability within which this might or might not be done. In the first place, there are limits within which an individual may be classified occupationally prior to employment. In the second place, there are so many occupational levels and so many fields in which statistical methods may be used that training prior to employment cannot be too specific. In the third place, many of the specialized statistical occupations, particularly those on lower intellectual levels, require little or no preemployment training.

This suggests that, in matching jobs with properly trained persons, we should look to training after employment, for only at that time, in many cases, will the occupational choice have become crystallized and the specific requirements of the job become fully known. This suggests also the desirability of cooperative programs in which work part-time and school part-time can keep the training geared to job requirements, as well as interneships, and other devices for providing, in addition to sheer theory, genuine work experience to which it may be related.

Another implication is greater flexibility in the kinds of courses so that individual needs might more adequately be met. In addition to long-term programs involving years of undergraduate and postgradu- ate study, and semester or quarter courses, there would be on a "demand" basis, short-term courses to meet the needs of various groups. The solution might be an informal laboratory type of what is some- times called extension training, which would enable individual workers on the job to sit under the counsel of an expert instructional staff to pursue a specific problem or to master some special related technique needed. Provisions could also be made for refresher training on all levels to enable persons to keep up with the rapidly developing science of statistical method. This kind of training would have to be adapted to existing and developing patterns of educational organization. Two possibilities in this connection are worth noting. One is the provision of technical training on levels not requiring college graduation. An educational development of current interest is that of vocational-technical training of this type.3 While the emphasis to date on this type of education has been in the industrial fields, the idea is as applicable to technical-business education, technical-agricultural education, and others. Another is the provision of what we might call "vocational-

3 U. S. Office of Education, Vocational-Technical Training for Industrial Occupations, Vocational Division Bulletin No. 228.



*TRAINING TO SUPPLY THE DEMAND 171

related statistics," adapted to specific vocational fields in which the individual is primarily a physicist, a chemist, a personnel specialist, or something else, but not a statistician. What is suggested here is a much finer breakdown of the field than the broad groupings of such things as econometrics, psychometrics, biometrics, educational statistics, and business statistics.

There are many non-vocational needs for statistics in our educational programs, just as there are for the other sciences. They need not con- flict with the practical concept which is the subject of this paper. Does the foregoing mean that the statistical content of our curricula must be thinned down? Does it mean that practical ends must outweigh the intellectual demands for improving a pure science? I think not. What I have in mind is a broadside approach to greater use of statistical techniques on all levels of human activity. It means training more people on more levels and training them better. What is needed is the leavening of the entire structure with the very useful tools of statistical method. For this to be accomplished, one must presuppose a greater field of application of the method in all phases of human activity and a need for better training and upgrading all along the line.



training to supply the demand

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