I’m in the process of transitioning from my current career in teaching to the NLP career via the Python path and while I’ve been learning on my own for about three months now I’ve found it a bit too slow and wanted to see if there’s a good course (described in the title) that’s really worth the money and time investment and would make things easier for someone like me?
One important requirement is that (for this purpose) I’ve no interest in exclusively self-study courses where you are supposed to watch videos or read text on your own without ever meeting anyone in real-time.
I’m not sure there are “entry level” NLP jobs that aren’t for sketchy startups without a future. I can’t imagine using openai APIs is a stable career as much as knowing how to make them.
If you were a senior programmer, there are roles that don’t need so much math – DevOps, reliability engineering, cloud deployment, and systems administration are some keywords you can look up on LinkedIn. These are quite broad and would be available at basically any company with a website or app.
Personally, I got an undegrad degree in applied mathematics and only kept going to school because the roles I wanted (ML development) required it. Your background in linguistics could certainly be useful for a team in which other people are the coding and math experts, but I do not come across those roles on LinkedIn very often outside of academia, which, unfortunately, require the degree.
Its really good to hear that the Andrew Ng class is comprehensible to you, so I think you’re on the right track either way.
In lieu of a degree, the only other thing I can suggest is building a portfolio online (GitHub, probably) and maybe contributing to an open source project. It will be very hard to find roles that don’t require you to know git and contribute to complex software projects, whether or not you have a degree.