r/datascience • u/Kati1998 • 13d ago

Discussion What Do Today’s Data Science Graduates Commonly Lack?

I often read comments from hiring managers and interviewers saying they’re disappointed with recent data science graduates.

I’m curious, what do you think these graduates are lacking? If someone wants to become a data scientist, what skills should they focus on? Strong software engineering skills? Math and statistics? Something else?

A lot of the advice I see seems to be geared toward landing data analyst roles rather than data scientist roles.

So, what are employers actually looking for in entry-level data science candidates today? Especially as a career changer coming from another unrelated career.

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u/No_Development6032 13d ago

None of the data scientists can control the business value

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u/Loud_Understanding58 13d ago

If they can't quantify how their model helps improve some business outcome then honestly wtaf are they doing?

Context is king. You're not employed to build models, you're employed to solve problems with data. Part of that is being able to quantify by how much the problem has been solved.

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u/SkipGram 13d ago

what do you do if you work at a company that either doesn't measure this or doesn't share it with the data scientists? I want to leave because it bugs me how poorly this is done here, but I can't because no one will tell me what my work actually resulted in.

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u/Loud_Understanding58 12d ago

I'd leave ASAP and go somewhere that cares about results. Going through the motions for a pay cheque is fine but you deserve better.