Specialist for market and social research
Specialist for market and social research (FAMS for short) has been a dual training occupation in Germany for market and social research since August 1, 2006 .
Vocational training
Specialist employees for market and social research participate in all steps of the implementation of market and social research projects. You take part in the planning, collect, organize and prepare information and data about the market. During the implementation of the projects, specialists for market and social research organize the use of interviewers who instruct them in their work according to the project specifications.
You will accompany the project throughout its duration, coordinate any appointments and the use of external service providers. The cooperation of the specialist for market and social research is also required for the evaluation. Here it is important to record the responses from interviews, to carry out quality controls and plausibility checks, to apply evaluation procedures, to process, code and archive the data. At the end of market and social research projects, the specialists prepare analysis results and present them in the form of tables and graphics . They create final reports and their summaries as well as target group-oriented presentation documents and they prepare presentations organisationally.
working area
Specialist employees for market and social research work in market research institutes and in companies with their own market research department as well as internal data collection. In addition, they will find suitable areas of application in business consulting, advertising agencies and institutions for empirical social and economic research. FAMS work in industrial, service and trading companies from all sectors with internal data collection, for example banks, insurance companies; Market and social research institutions, for example in opinion polls and social research institutes; in business and public relations consulting and advertising design, for example in advertising and media agencies; in research and development in all scientific higher education institutions; as well as in public service institutions, for example authorities at district, senate and federal level.
Places of work
Specialists in market and social research spend their working hours mainly in the office in front of the screen, where they research, evaluate and process data. Meetings and presentations take place in meeting rooms. They instruct interviewers in training rooms.
Topics and focus of the training
- Application operating systems, standard software; Collect, save, maintain and process data;
- Classification of market and social research in business processes and definition of application processes;
- Differentiation of the methods, survey techniques and types of investigation in qualitative and quantitative primary and secondary research ;
- Coordination of presentation dates and the organizational preparation of the presentations;
- Test procedures for the suitability of methods, survey techniques and examination types for the respective project;
- Design questionnaires and interview guidelines and prepare and conduct sample interviews and draw conclusions for the actual survey;
- Carry out plausibility checks;
- Prepare project results for internal and external use;
- Transfer of knowledge to plan capacities, time requirements and deadlines and to create and coordinate a project schedule from this;
- Organization of the use of external service providers on a contractual basis;
- Coordination of the implementation of the project schedule;
- Implementation of selected results in charts and preparation of presentations and results reports;
In the middle of the second year of training, a written intermediate examination with practice-related tasks is carried out to check the level of training. The exam lasts a maximum of 120 minutes and in the practical part it contains tasks from the fields “Application areas of market and social research”, “Organization and data protection framework”, “Secondary statistics and secondary sources” and “Economics and social studies”.
The final examination comprises four examination areas, three written examinations and a case-related technical discussion. In the written exams knowledge of practice-related tasks and cases is tested.