Companies are mining tons of data on all of us, but they have little idea how to use it. And a mountain of data with no one to interpret it is basically worthless. “Every time you swipe your credit card you’re giving a company a large amount of data,” Lund said. “Companies have a huge amount of data, but they need people who manipulate it to be useful for them so they can better understand how to target consumers.” Enter the statisticians. According to the New York Times, the rising demand for statisticians is a byproduct of the explosion of digital data. From the digitization of public records to massive amounts of information sent out each day through social media, in every industry there is a large amount of raw data out there to be explored and harnessed. Statisticians are those who look for meaningful patterns and insights to do things like help Google make its search engine results more accurate and help Netflix better their movie recommendation system. The field is projected to grow 13% from 2008 to 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.