When are Statistics Jobs Posted?

One of the better websites that regularly posts Statistics jobs is this one at the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida. If you have ever looked for a postdoc, a faculty position, government job or applied statistician type-job in statistics, you have probably come across this website before.

As I am currently a postdoc, I was curious about two things: (1) What is the most frequent type job posted? Who is the target audience of this website? (2) If certain types of statistics jobs had a preferred target range over the academic year?

To do this, I enlisted the help of some wonderful R-packages from Hadley Wickham to help with the gathering of the data (rvest), cleaning the data (stringr, lubridate) and visualizing the data (ggplot2).  One caveat about this data is the website only posts the job postings from August 2014 until now.  The R code is available below in Rmarkdown and Markdown and in a gist.

For simplicity, I grouped the type of positions into four categories:

1. faculty = tentured or non-tenured faculty position including chairs, deans and department heads.
2. postdoc = postdoctoral fellows
3. lecturer = lecturer or instructor
4. statistican = a statistican whose primary role is data analysis or managing other data analysts.

The majority of statistics jobs posted on the UF website since August 2014 have been faculty positions.

Statistics job postings are fairly uniformly posted Mon-Fri on this UF website.

The frequency of the statistics job postings increase Sept - Nov.

This increase in the months Sept-Nov is mostly driven by academic faculty positions (not surprisingly).  If you are looking for postdoc positions, they tend to be more frequently posted after this time period.  Lecturer/Instructor positions are fairly uniform. Similarly, applied statistician jobs do not seem to have a peak range.