Not a PhD but I hire many data scientists, with and without PhDs. Unless you are working in a research setting that requires publishing papers, you probably don

Not a PhD but I hire many data scientists, with and without PhDs. Unless you are working in a research setting that requires publishing papers, you probably don't need to worry about having a PhD. You can work on your skills in a number of other ways. This also depends on your long-term career goals. If you want to eventually manage teams or products, the years you put into a PhD might actually take away from experience around product design, strategy, management, and communication, all of which are critical to moving into leadership roles. Some hiring managers even look down on PhDs as they can sometimes be too pedantic, nuanced, and miss the "bigger picture" around decision making. I wouldn't personally go this far but just be aware of the tradeoffs and biases. Of course, if your only goal is to do research then you should probably get a PhD... I've run a few webinars with people who have moved from academia to industrial data science, and here are two talks you might appreciate: https://phaseai.com/resources/from-phd-to-applied-ml https://phaseai.com/resources/from-phd-to-applied-ml and https://phaseai.com/resources/career-data-product-management https://phaseai.com/resources/career-data-product-management