Am i going in the right direction

Hi

About a month ago i decided to look into finaly changing carrers. In the past 2 years ive worked in customer services for the same company. The first year was more tech focused working with a certain fruit shaped company. Went from doing basic support to a senior level of support in that year. Sadly that part of the company moved elsewhere so i was moved to a different section of the company which was is customer services focused with little to no tech. During this pandemic ive been saving about 2 hours a day traveling to and from work as i am currenlty WAH. I have been learning python as its looked fun to learn. So far ive learned the basics of loops, sets, lists and dictionary. Durning this time ive started to get alot more intrested in machines learning and the idea of making things more automated. Im 24 going on 25 with only a basic pass in I.T from school. Will i still be able to progress into an tech career working with machine learning or am i better focusing more on software engineering and trying to secure a job in that.

Well, no one has chimed in so I’ll give it a go.

You’re still young so I think the more important question is: What do you want to do?

If you like ML, then learn that. Keep in mind (and this is my mostly uninformed opinion) those jobs can be harder to get and they tend to favor people with degrees in those fields. That being said, if you get a good body of projects together, you might be able to get a some entry level position. But landing a first job is very hard, even in the best of circumstances.

Software engineering is such a broad field. Just start learning and see where your interests take you.

I’ve read some Reddit threads suggesting that ML is an uber-competitive field , extremely tiny, and most of the jobs go to people with degrees from Stanford and whatnot. There are some pretty active Reddit communities with working programmers, so it might be a good idea to read some threads over there to keep up on the conventional wisdom.

Thanks @kevinSmith and @CactusWren2020

So it seems the smartest thing to do would be to continue with my learning and then from there see what sections of python i enjoy the most and see what fields focus more on what i enjoy. Im still quite new to this and as you know there is so much you can do. Just the though of ai and programming a machine to be able to learn from us without import seems amazing. But im fine with just exploring that as a hobby . Right now i need learn and practice and get myself into the tech field. As its probably alot easier to move around inside the tech field than trying to approach a specific section that requires alot of experience that you would probably get from the experience
of different sections of it.