>but hiring managers know they need people with a formal education It's the exact opposite: as better tools are developed, there is less "formal education" re

>but hiring managers know they need people with a formal education It's the exact opposite: as better tools are developed, there is less "formal education" required. In the same way that Web Devs are in high demand, and nobody needs a Computer Science degree to do that work. The reality is, "data driven decision making" is something businesses large and small are discovering they need. And often times that sort of analysis requires a regression, or maybe something slightly more sophisticated. What these businesses do not need is some cutting edge algorithm or complex AI pipeline. There is a ton of gate-keeping in this space, as the the PhDs learn that domain experience and business acumen are more important than a deep knowledge of the algorithms. A significant amount of the work is cleaning and processing the data. This is the way of the world. At the end of the day, most business problems boil down to inference and prediction, and most times you don't need to be incredibly precise; the easy 80% will do.