Why people with PhD have a hard time to find a job in Industry?

I often talk with people, who have a lot of experience analyzing data in research context, but can't find a job outside of research. Why is it so?

There are multiple reasons. Let's talk about one of them today: missing skills.

All skills and competencies can be presented in onion-like structure. Inside, in the core, you have analytical thinking, statistics, hypothesis testing, etc. These skills require a lot of time and good teachers. Working on a thesis in a good university or scientific center usually gives you perfect conditions. And therefore most Natural Science graduates mastered core skills during their PhD.  

However there are also outer layers: tools and approaches used in Industry. An example for Data Analytics would be SQL and dashboards (PowerBI, Tableau). It isn’t something widely used in the research. Although it isn't so hard to learn, many former researchers don't recognize how important this requirement is. Here is the thing: there are plenty of job seekers on the market, e.g people graduated from a Data bootcamp and learnt all important outer-layer tools there. From the check-boxes point of view they actually check more boxes than graduates with PhD in Natural Science.

Does it mean what all these graduates must go to a data bootcamp?

Not necessarily, but you definitely need to prepare upskill yourself and acquire the missing skills. 

If you don’t want to be on this journey alone or would like to go through this phase faster, consider hiring a mentor, a good mentor can make a huge difference and safe you from many resources of frustration and confusion on the way.