Machine-learning engineer was the fastest growing job category in the five years to 2017, according to LinkedIn. But tech's hottest role isn't a simple field to break into, requiring at least high school math and some programming knowledge, even to get started. Luckily there are an increasing number of options for those wanting to get a grounding in the field, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the latest tech giant to release a set of machine-learning courses for free. That's in addition to the existing well-regarded material available online from the likes of fast.ai and Andrew Ng and Coursera. If you're interested in these courses, it's worth noting that you'll benefit more if you have a basic knowledge of Python and high school linear algebra, statistics, and calculus.

Machine-learning engineer was the fastest growing job category in the five years to 2017, according to LinkedIn. But tech's hottest role isn't a simple field to break into, requiring at least high school math and some programming knowledge, even to get started. Luckily there are an increasing number of options for those wanting to get a grounding in the field, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the latest tech giant to release a set of machine-learning courses for free. That's in addition to the existing well-regarded material available online from the likes of fast.ai and Andrew Ng and Coursera. It's worth noting that most of these courses will benefit from having a basic knowledge of Python and high school linear algebra, statistics and calculus.

Machine-learning engineer was the fastest growing job category in the five years to 2017, according to LinkedIn. But tech's hottest role isn't a simple field to break into, requiring at least high school math and some programming knowledge, even to get started. Luckily there are an increasing number of options for those wanting to get a grounding in the field, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the latest tech giant to release a set of machine-learning courses for free. That's in addition to the existing well-regarded material available online from the likes of fast.ai and Andrew Ng and Coursera. If you're interested in these courses, it's worth noting that you'll benefit more if you have a basic knowledge of Python and high school linear algebra, statistics, and calculus.

Here's something every tech company agrees on: the world needs more AI engineers. Microsoft is the latest firm to try to answer this demand, and this week, it launched a new course on its tech accreditation scheme (known as the Microsoft Professional Program) dedicated to artificial intelligence. The course has 10 modules, each taking between eight and 16 hours to complete online. They cover a range of sub-disciplines, including computer vision, data analysis, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Interestingly, there's also an ethics course (a topic Microsoft is paying close attention as it pivots to focus on AI) as well as a module on machine learning in Azure, the company's cloud platform.

As a software engineer at Microsoft, Elena Voyloshnikova's job is to make informed recommendations about how to improve the performance of software engineering tools. But too often, she spends her days manually analyzing the data she needs to make those decisions. Lately, her team has been discussing the potential of building machine learning models to automate that task – creating more time to focus on the decision-making. That's why she was intrigued when she received an email announcing an upcoming AI training session for Microsoft employees. "I asked my manager, 'Can I go to this?'" she said.