Abstract

Industry is pulling Statistical Science graduates away from academia and the pursuit of further postgraduate studies. Within South Africa, this industry draw has resulted in a crisis in academic capacity building within Statistical Sciences. Two primary factors are identified as preventing the move away from academia. Firstly, academic salaries in the Statistical Sciences are not comparable to what industry would pay at the same level of qualification (especially with the growth of ‘Data Science’). Secondly, the lack of supervisory skills and capacity, especially at the doctoral level, is evident across South African Statistics departments. Following the discussions documented by Fabris-Rotelli et al. (2022), there seems to be an urgent need to devise guidelines to support active early-career doctoral supervisors in South Africa. These guidelines are incorporated into a guiding rubric, and are not published as a prescriptive set of rules, but rather a dynamic document encouraging the growth of both the novice supervisor and the doctoral candidate. This paper presents the current evolution of this guiding rubric.