Back in the late 1980s, I began learning Autocad and autolisp, first at home on an expensive(!) PC-XT (!!!), and along with Coreldraw it helped me to get my first job -- in an engineering company in Mumbai where I developed my first 3D project -- a PCB UV curing machine in 2 sizes, portable and general.
Autocad, even at that premitive stage, I remember we got the entire program on about 20 or so 5-1/4" floppies, helped me do the 3D portable machine in just 21 days!! Everything that was designed on the latest PC system then -- an Intel 386, went into our engineering production unit without too many problems because Autocad helped the designing team, I being the sole Autocad expert, construct the machine first on the PC then those separate parts views were printed on A4 plotter, and then taken for physical construction. At that time, I also developed and used many helpful autolisp programs, I developed most of them, to make the work move faster. The entire design was completed in just 21 days!
And the fact is, I began learning autocad just about 6 months before I got into that job, and then in about a month after I joined, this project was completed!
So the point is, if you put yourself wholeheartedly into any field of graphics, you can develop yourself into a very high level of expertise. It wasn't easy back then because there were only a few books available, and a related magazine called Cadence (that too after I got the job) to help me. Now you have everything at your fingertips | mouse-clicks! You can get the sw downloaded on your machine, and begin practicing related online tutorials within one hour or even less! I guess that 1 month of hard|smart-work is sufficient to an average person to become a skilled graphics operator in any chosen field if he/she applies completely to it.
P.S.:
I remember that I used to keep the PC-XT, costing about INR 32,000 that time (then, the new Intel 80386 based PCs with a 40 MB harddisk(!!!) cost more than Rs. 1,00,000), open most of the time, and one day a fcing rat went into it and pissed on the motherboard

. That destroyed my firstever PC completely, and I had to buy another motherboard (secondhand, because the new motherboards were more expensive and beyond my reach then) for another huge expense of 10k+ (don't remember how much I paid for it)....