To add to this: for someone who has never done any data science, how would you go from zero knowledge to machine learning, for instance?

This would require learning calculus, then statistics & probability, then linear regressions & generalized linear models, then machine learning(NLP, machine vision and/or AI). I’m not sure how someone can learn all of that in one year let alone 6 months with no prior experience in the field.

I can sort of see it being done but it would have to be very superficial knowledge which is sort of useless when your trying to recreate some paper that uses advanced stats and math. You could maybe recreate the paper but you would essentially being shooting in the dark and you wouldn’t really know the limitations of the model in any meaningful way.

Im curious to know how they will address this?

I don’t think you need a PhD in statistics or machine learning to be a good data scientist, but I’m just having a hard time believing all the skills can be learned in less than one year without any experience.