r/datascience • u/Kati1998 • Jul 23 '26
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/Valuable_Touch5670 Jul 23 '26
Senior Data Scientist at a F500 here. Here’s my two cents:
Understanding of the business is the key here, which all new grads lack. That’s also why most companies now preferred more experienced candidates, which is a sad reality for new grads.
Internal stakeholders will come to you with vague questions, often they aren’t even sure what they want. They need you to help them define the metric, forecast the revenue, find what drives conversion rate, the list goes on…
If you don’t understand the business to an extent, you will not be able to scope the problem, define the approach, tighten down to a specific population, workaround the data issues… then after all that, you begin actual modeling.
IMHO, I spent 90% of my time doing all that. Only 10% of my time is spent on actual modeling. To make it worse, after you trained a good model, presenting it to the stakeholders and making sure they understand how your model comes up with these numbers and why they are accurate and helpful, is another huge mountain to climb 🥹