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Industry Trends
Jan 2026
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ITJobNotify Team
Data Science Reality Check 2026: Do You Really Need a PhD?
An honest look at data science hiring expectations in 2026.
Data ScienceAI Jobs
Estimated reading time: 3
Data Science Reality Check 2026
A PhD is not mandatory for most data science roles.
What Matters More
- Strong statistics
- Business problem framing
- Practical ML projects
Typical Hiring Focus
- SQL & Python
- Data cleaning
- Model evaluation
Learning Resources
- Kaggle → https://www.kaggle.com/
- Coursera ML → https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
Read time: ~3 minutes
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ITJobNotify Team
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