The hard part is I think he might have a point, there is a lot more to been a professional software engineer than I think can reasonably be taught in 5 months (even if you spend that 5 months learning 20 hours a day 7 days a week).

Of course this is all entirely my own opinion, I've seen evidence neither one way or the other to back it up but if I where hiring a software engineer (lets say a web developer because that's mostly what I do these days so the most likely hire I'd make in the near time).

This is at least what I'd expect of someone calling themselves a software engineer :-

At least two programming languages (I don't really care what they are a good programmer can be competent in any of the major web languages fairly quickly).

A solid grasp of HTML, CSS and Javascript (I don't care if you have to google some of this stuff but you should understand the DOM, the CSS selector model and enough Javascript to write a jQuery plugin)

A solid of grasp of relational databases including the following (primary keys, normalization, key constraints, indexes - I'd also expect but not require they'd understand some of the internals and how a query planner works) and a solid grasp of SQL.

A solid understanding of DBAL's, ORM's.

Solid grasp of common design patters (active record, repositories/entity, unit of work)

Solid grasp of MVC and the pro's and cons

Good understanding of either Windows or Linux.

Good understanding of source control.

Good understanding of why comments are important.

Good understanding of unit testing/integration testing.

To use an analogy (I deal with lots of business people, analogies help) You could teach someone to lay bricks to a good standard in 5 months, You could not teach them to be a safe civil engineer.