Credit for figuring out how-to do this goes to vmtn users Bogdam and intel008 as they are the ones who posted the resolution in the following thread at VMTN: macOS Catalina VMs do not run in VMware Fusion 11.1.0 Here’s a quick note on how-to setup a macOS catalina VM on VMware Fusion 11.
Update: This is no longer an issue with Fusion 11.5
