Teaching statistics to future statisticians should take into account both statistical knowledge and personal skills needed in the statisticians' professional life. Based on a questionnaire designed to assess competencies actually needed by statisticians in the workplace, this paper aims to detect if the competence framework helps to better understand the transition from university to work. With this objective, three metric profiles are proposed to locate knowledge, "relational skills" and actually performed activities, and graduate scores. The graduates in Statistical Sciences from "Sapienza" University of Rome from March 2000 to March 2001 were acquired as emblematic cases in Spring 2004. There were 146 respondents out of the total of 296 graduates in the time period. The Rasch analysis is applied to analyze the data and to build on the profiles. In particular the analysis was performed applying the Rasch family response models to polytomous items. The item parameters and the latent trait value for each respondent are estimated by the joint maximum likelihood method. The analysis results could be useful in order to design curricula for university degrees in Statistics that would make the university-workplace transition process easier.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education