The premise is a basic understanding of matrices and stats. Then go through a course on machine learning (supervized, unsupervised, deep and reinforcement learning). That’s for the theory. Easy if you know your math and python.

The practical side is endless tweaking of the data and the models. And keeping yourself informed about new models and techniques (throug scientific papers)

thanks! i think i understand the nature of the job okay, i think its more my ability to realistically get there in 6-12 months is what i'm concerned about