[thornad]

I've done this kind of thing most of my career, including doing it for NASA and Unilever Research. You can't really train an average graduate to do this. You need someone with a pretty highly developed integration between 1:intuitive/creative abilities, 2:mathematical/analytical skills, and 3:engineering/ability to make things happen. Add to that 4:work experience in the real world, and 5:ability to easily understand how things work in a field you delve into for the first time... And there's very few people in the world who can do this. At my previous work place we tried for a whole year to hire someone who would at have at least some of these skills and seems promising to develop the rest on the job. We couldn't find anyone although we interviewed about 30 different people (from about 500 resumes most of them with a PhD in ML from a good university). And this was in central London, UK.

[bearmf]

But you never tried training them. Sure, no one can do it right off the bat, without prior experience.