The answer to this question is mostly opinion based and hence not so practical for stackexchange.
Nevertheless, here is my take on this, having both experience in academia and industry. I would first distinguish between knowledge and skills:
- understanding of different optimization models and techniques (knowledge)
- you must develop a toolbox of optimization methods, such that given a problem, you can apply the 'right' tool to solve the problem. This requires in-depth knowledge of various approaches to be able to assess what will and what won't work.
- understanding of a problem domain (knowledge)
- it helps if you have at least 1 problem domain in which you are specialized, understand the different models commonly used to solve problems in that domain, know who else works in this domain, and know the state-of-the-art. Think about domains such as healthcare (e.g. nurse rostering), transportation (e.g. routing), or scheduling. You might argue that a person with optimization skills can tackle any problem domain, but in practice it helps a lot if you have prior knowledge in a particular domain.
- ability to implement models, programming (skills)
- particularly in industry, you must be able to implement, test and evaluate your models. Most companies require familiarity with a programming language (Java/C++/C#/Python), a solver (xpress/gurobi/cplex) and sometimes matlab.
- ability to process and analyse data, as well as to make results interpretable (skills)
- in the era of big-data, data processing and analysis skills are indispensable. Python and matlab are currently the most common. Knowledge of statistics is also a must.
- ability to distill the right optimization problem (skills)
- this is perhaps more of a soft-skill. Very often, when working in industry, the problems given to you will be highly ambiguous. Your task is to ask the right questions, and to distill the right problem to solve. More often than not, the people owning the problems are non-technical, have no optimization background and it will take a considerable amount of effort to understand the actual problem that requires solving (which might be very different from what is being asked by the problem owners).
When interviewing with a company, you will be tested on all of the above. If you have the knowledge but not the skills, or vice versa, you have a clear direction on what to improve. Obviously, the above knowledge and skills list is substantial and you won't master them all at once. The most natural approach is to get hands-on experience by working on practical problems. Read papers in a domain you are interested in, look for papers that are motivated by real-world problems (as opposed to a stylized academic problem), and pay attention to what data sources these papers use to perform their experimental evaluation. Just to give an example, both prof Bertsimas as well as prof van Hentenryck have some very interesting papers on online, large scale vehicle routing and ride-sharing/transit problems.
Finally, there is often a difference between models you will find in academic papers and models that are used to solve industry problems. Models in industry are often required to be scalable, implementable, maintainable, interpretable, extendable, must often be developed within a very limited amount of time, must be able to handle all sorts of real-world side-constraints as well as uncertainty and inaccuracies in data input. In practice you will often have to make a compromise between performance and complexity.
