best way to get data into a new instance?

Let's pretend I'm creating an Employee class, which I will later subclass for more specific jobs. Each instance will have stuff like a name, title, degrees held, etc. etc.

So I'm wondering, is the best way to get all this information into the object to just have a really long __init__ method that takes each argument?

Does a question like this depend on how the class will be used? I'm trying to construct it in a way that is independent of, say, the GUI interface that will be used, but I can't help but think that if all the data is entered into a GUI, then passed programmatically to the class, then it's no big deal because it happens behind the scenes. But if, for instance, someone manually created a new instance, they would have a ton of arguments to type in each time. Granted, even with the GUI they are basically typing in arguments, but in the manual case you'd have to type in the call to the class, the parentheses, commas, quotes around the strings, etc. (But still, I'm trying not to let a specific interface influence the construction of what should probably be a completely independent class implementation.)

Thanks.
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