The Directorate General Statistics (DG/S) of the European Central Bank (ECB) is seeking recent graduates or students who have at least completed their first cycle of education (bachelor) at the closing date of this vacancy.
DG/S is responsible for developing, compiling and disseminating the statistics and the related statistical indicators that the ECB needs to conduct its monetary policy and macro-prudential tasks, and that enable the other functions of the ECB (including banking supervision), the Eurosystem and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) to be carried out. DG/S also provides statistical support to the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB).

For this purpose, DG/S cooperates closely with other ECB business areas, the national central banks of the Member States of the European Union (EU), the European Commission (especially Eurostat), European and national supervisory authorities, international organisations, the national statistical institutes of EU Member States and the statistical departments of certain international institutions.
DG/S comprises six divisions:

External Statistics Division
This Division develops, compiles and disseminates the euro area’s external statistics and statistical indicators, in particular the balance of payments, the international investment position and effective exchange rates. It also manages the Centralised Securities Database (CSDB) and the ECB’s centralised market data services.
Macroeconomic Statistics Division
This Division develops, compiles and disseminates the statistics regarding the financial and non-financial sector accounts for the euro area. This includes balance sheets and transactions for all sectors of the economy. It also develops, compiles and/or disseminates statistics on prices and costs, output and demand, the labour market and government finance and, where appropriate, liaises with the primary producers of such data.
Monetary and Financial Statistics Division

This Division develops, compiles and disseminates the balance sheet and interest rate statistics regarding monetary financial institutions (including statistics on monetary aggregates), investment funds, insurance corporations and pension funds and other financial intermediaries. In addition, it maintains a register of reference data on financial intermediaries and compiles and disseminates statistics relating to financial stability, financial integration and financial markets – including a wide range of high frequency market data, yield curves and securities (issues) statistics – as well as statistics regarding the money market and payment systems within the EU Member States. Moreover, work is on-going relating to the collection of daily money market data on secured, unsecured and derivatives markets, as well as granular credit and credit risk data.

Statistics Development/Coordination Division
This Division develops new types of statistics and statistical indicators (current projects include work relating to financial stability, financial derivatives, securities holdings, banknotes and payment cards). It also develops, compiles and disseminates statistics on surveys relating to household finance and consumption and access to finance small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition, it contributes to work on European and global statistical standards, including the reconciliation of statistical and supervisory reporting frameworks, and the design of a standardised and integrated data warehouse enabling banks to generate final reports.

Statistical Information Services Division
This Division develops and applies the statistical tools and procedures to collect, produce, manage and disseminate the ECB’s statistics through various channels (databases, website, publications, etc.) and is involved in the development and maintenance of the Statistical Data Warehouse (SDW). It provides IT support to internal and external users of the databases, implements best practices in statistical data exchange and management (e.g. SDMX data model), and harmonises statistical processes. This includes crossdivisional tasks such as the development of an ECB integrated data management enabling the common processing of ECB data such as monetary policy, banking supervision and payment systems data.

Supervisory Statistics Division
This Division develops, collects, compiles and disseminates the datasets and quantitative risk reports for supervisory purposes. This entails the coordination, receipt, quality management and reconciliation of supervisory data of credit institutions. In addition, it produces derived statistics or indicators for the quantitative risk assessment system (RAS) as well as for other statistical and analytical needs in the ECB. In close cooperation with national central banks/national competent authorities, it develops and implements methodologies (e.g. completeness checks, outlier analysis, data clustering, etc.) in order to assess the quality of the supervisory data collected. It contributes to the further development and harmonisation of supervisory information in close collaboration with banking supervision business areas and in cooperation with the European Banking Authority.
Further information on the work of DG/S can be found on the statistics pages of the ECB’s website. For further information on trainee profiles, see the careers pages of the ECB’s website.
The successful applicant will be entrusted with the following main tasks:

• participate actively in the work of one of the divisions;
• gain an insight into conceptual, methodological and operational work on statistics in a policy-oriented environment;

• work independently, under the guidance of a mentor, use their initiative and interact with other members of staff.

Trainees may also have an opportunity to complete a conceptual or empirical study, suitable for presentation at an internal seminar.
Typically, around 35 trainees are recruited to work on different tasks and projects each year. Some examples are given below.

• In the Macroeconomic Statistics Division, trainees may work on the compilation, statistical analysis and dissemination of general economic statistics, such as price and output statistics. Trainees may also work on compiling and analysing statistics from the financial and non-financial accounts, and developing new publication formats. They may also be involved in seasonal adjustment or the analysis of government finance statistics.
• In the External Statistics Division, they may work on monitoring the quality of statistics on the balance of payments and international investment position, as well as methods and sources in EU Member States. They may also work on tasks related to the CSDB, which is a large micro database for security-related information. This could include the involvement in regular data quality assessment, the development of new tools for data monitoring and data analysis. In addition, trainees may be involved in the management of the ECB’s needs for commercial market data.
• In the Monetary and Financial Statistics Division, they may work on the collection, compilation, statistical analysis and dissemination of monetary and financial statistics. Inter alia, these include statistics on bank interest rates and balance sheets (also covering monetary aggregates), securitisation statistics, insurance corporation and pension fund data, payment statistics, yield curves, financial markets data (also covering Credit Risk parameters), money market statistics and surveys, securities issues statistics, option-implied probability density functions and statistics required for financial stability analysis and systemic risk monitoring. In addition, trainees are also involved in technical tasks related to data processing such as the maintenance and development of tools in various programming languages (mainly FAME, R, VBA and SAS). Trainees may also take part in data analysis and support the development of new statistical products and projects, such as analytical credit and credit risk datasets.
• In the Statistical Information Services Division, they may work on programming (mainly FAME, JAVA, Perl and UNIX scripts), data loading, metadata maintenance, first-line support for the statistical business areas and end-users, maintenance of the hotline, testing of applications and many tasks in support of the publication process. They may also support the work on establishing the data governance and processes, semantics and the information system architecture required for an integrated management of granular data across the ECB.
• In the Supervisory Statistics Division, they may assist in the receipt, quality management and reconciliation of supervisory data of credit institutions as well as in the production of derived statistics or indicators for the RAS as well as for other statistical and analytical needs in the ECB. Furthermore, they may assist in organising and coordinating meetings and in setting up agendas of related international working groups and may contribute to the work of other international working and expert groups.
• In the Statistics Development/Coordination Division, trainees may work on: (i) designing, together with the banking industry, a standardised data warehouse enabling banks to generate final reports; (ii) reconciling statistical and supervisory reporting requirements (including related legal aspects); (iii) developing and maintaining statistical datasets for financial stability purposes, with a focus on financial derivatives and asset-backed securities; (iv) securities holdings statistics; (v) international payment cards; and (vi) preparing material for senior management including speeches and presentations.
• In addition, trainees may be involved in the development and regular running of the joint European Commission/ECB survey on access to finance of enterprises (SAFE) and the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS)

Qualifications and experience:

Applicants must have the following knowledge and competencies:

• The traineeships are aimed at those who have at least completed their first cycle of education (bachelor) at the closing date of this vacancy or equivalent in economics, econometrics, statistics, mathematics, finance or other relevant disciplines (e.g. computer science).
• an advanced command of English with proven drafting ability;
• an intermediate knowledge of at least one other official language of the EU;
• good IT skills and a working knowledge of MS Office (in particular Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access);

• familiarity with a statistical or mathematical software package and related computer programming experience (Stata, Matlab, R, SAS, VBA or equivalent) and/or relational databases (Oracle, DB2, MySQL or equivalent) would be a major asset;

• ideally, knowledge of financial instruments, institutions and markets, as well as statistical methods;
• knowledge of economic statistics and/or international statistical, accounting or supervisory standards would be an important additional asset;
• familiarity with data analysis, advanced data analytics and/or data management would be an asset;

• familiarity with dynamic programming languages (JAVA, Perl or equivalent) would be an important asset in the Statistical Information Services Division;
• familiarity with the techniques and approach for the management of large data sets, data modelling and analysis of unstructured data (“Big Data”) would be an asse

Competencies:

The successful candidate will have the following behavioural competencies:

• has analytical and quantitative skills, and a proven ability to deliver results and provide innovative solutions to problems;
• communicates effectively, presenting complex issues in a clear and concise manner;
• shares information and supports colleagues in the attainment of common goals;

• can work independently, under the guidance of a mentor, using their initiative and interacting with other members of staff
• examines issues critically and applies relevant approaches geared towards successful solutions;

• analyses complex datasets from diverse sources.

Further Information:

Traineeship of three to six months, with the possibility of an extension to up to 12 months in total.

The selection committee may place suitable candidates on a reserve list, from which candidates may be appointed to similar positions in the same or another business area. It may also be decided to fill the position(s) advertised in this vacancy notice with a suitable candidate or candidates from the reserve list resulting from a recruitment procedure for a similar position. Candidates will be informed accordingly if this happens.

How to apply:

Applications are to be made in English and submitted using our online application form. An «Applicants’ Guide» can be downloaded from our recruitment pages.

The recruitment process may include a pre-screening exercise and a telephone interview.

Before applying, applicants should check that they meet the conditions set out in Article 4 of the rules governing the traineeship programme:

http://www.ecb.europa.eu/careers/pdf/traineeship_programme.pdf.

Further information on the ECB’s traineeships can be found at

http://www.ecb.europa.eu/careers/newcomers/trainee/html/index.en.html.

Applicants are accepted from nationals of the Member States of the European Union.

The requirements laid down in the vacancy notice must be met by the closing date for applications.

This vacancy notice may be used to fill the same position again, or similar positions, within 12 months of the selection decision.

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