Funny you mention this. In my brief stint there, I saw a fresh college graduate get promoted to a lead for a Scanning Unit simply because the current lead was retiring (I was actually offered that position, but I was leaving and turned it down). They were trained in less than a month by shadowing the lead on-the-verge-of-retirement. The engineer who got promoted was at Intel less than a year, and had no prior internship experience (they were hired in 2021 when chips were in desperate need of talent. You might recall the chip shortage that affected cars etc.)