It doesn't take 5 years to teach yourself Machine Learning. While it is definitely a skill, it is not black magic. With a 5 year delta you could easily have ML experience, and a lot more as well to differentiate yourself.
It doesn't take 5 years to teach yourself Machine Learning.
The low-hanging fruit in ML is absurdly low these days, the tools are very good and there is loads of sample code available. If you were already good with Python or R, and already had some nice clean data, you could be doing something useful with Keras in a day, no joke.
