Same experience hiring Junior Data Scientist, it's a shitshow out there. The level is so low that I had to hire a "old school" statistician with a senior position
These fields are relatively new. There doesn’t seem to be a clear path to break into them.
Personally, I believe Kaggle is one of the ways to slowly gain some practical experience: https://www.kaggle.com/
However, I’m not sure if it’s sufficient.
Recently, I’ve been taking a deeper dive into studying various types of competitions. For example, I’ve created a repo where I’m organizing notebooks, etc for a regression competition:
The field is new yes but before covid the recent graduate with even 1 year of experience were so good compared to now. The real problem is that with remote work you can't really learn something if you're a fresh graduate. I had my worst interns during the last two years, and I don't think that they were stupid. The real problem is that they can't really learn in remote when I don't have the time to teach them. When we were in the office they would jsut follow in every meeting, pair coding and so on. I love remote work, for me it's a bless, I exploit wvery single minute of my day working, but for interns and juniors is a nightmare they are not going to learn anything from me or from others.
Personally, I believe Kaggle is one of the ways to slowly gain some practical experience: https://www.kaggle.com/
However, I’m not sure if it’s sufficient.
Recently, I’ve been taking a deeper dive into studying various types of competitions. For example, I’ve created a repo where I’m organizing notebooks, etc for a regression competition:
https://github.com/melling/ml-regression
I’m creating others for classification, nlp, vision, etc
Of course, the self-study method means people have knowledge gaps because there’s no syllabus tailored for an interview