Rachel Hilliam, chair of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals, says it is unusual for societies like the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the BCS and the Institute of Maths and its Applications (IMA) to work together in professional accreditation.
Hilliam is a professor of statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the Open University (OU) and is a statistician first and foremost. She has been with the OU since 2011 and before that worked for Derby Hospitals Trust as its sole medical statistician across a plethora of research projects and clinical trials.
She is also a vice-president of the Royal Statistical Society, where is focused on professional affairs.
Hilliam recalls that, in 2019, there was a lot of discussion about the rise of data science as an interdisciplinary field between the societies that are backing the new Alliance, principally the RSS, the BCS and the IMA, “and the fact that there was a need for the professionalisation of data scientists”.
She adds: “While as societies we might work together on policy statements, we don’t normally work together in terms of something like accreditation. That was something that was really quite new between the societies to have this sort of working relationship. Indeed, there was a lot of conversation that went on before we got to that process of being able to formalise what the Alliance was, and even whether it was something that we could do between societies.”
The Alliance certified its first cohort of data scientists in July 2022, recognising them as having met the standard for the discipline agreed between the RSS, the BCS and the IMA, but also the Operational Research Society, the Alan Turing Institute, and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). A total of 13 data scientists were accredited, all of them experienced and advanced in their careers – and there was a roughly 50/50 gender split between them.
Later this year, the Alliance hopes to present an early career certificate, but it is early days for the initiative in terms of how it will go to market, says Hilliam.
For its part, the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, flagged the Alliance as an element in the six technology priorities it proposed to new prime minister Liz Truss upon her election by Conservative Party members. The data science profession, it said, was “key to economic growth”.
“Government should work with the Alliance to ensure the UK has a strong pipeline of trusted data scientists to drive growth in the economy”
Rachel Hilliam, Alliance for Data Science Professionals
It drew attention to the Alliance for Data Science Professionals as “co-founded by BCS, which awarded the first group of data scientists with its new standard this year”, adding: “Government should work with the Alliance to ensure the UK has a strong pipeline of trusted data scientists to drive growth in the economy.”
Hilliam says: “The Alliance brings together the different societies where we feel we have members who are data scientists. And while each of those individual societies supports those people and puts on events for those people, what none of the societies had was a professional accreditation route for those individuals.
“In the RSS, we’ve got a ‘chartered statistician’ route, and some of the data scientists will fit into that, but certainly not all of them. There is a similar thing for the BCS, where they’ve got their chartered IT professionals. …….