Based on my personal experience, learning the ins and outs of the Magento platform can be quite a lucrative long-term investment, especially if you plan to do s

Based on my personal experience, learning the ins and outs of the Magento platform can be quite a lucrative long-term investment, especially if you plan to do some consulting later. There's no shortage of open positions for Magento experts. Certificates play a significant role here, so you might want to look into that later if you decide to go down this path. I'm talking about the situation in Europe, so I don't know if it's also true in the US. Nevertheless, by everyone working remotely now, you could work for a European company and get some pretty sick rates as a Magento consultant, easily over 100EUR/hr. It's built on PHP, and elements of ZF (which is not actually that hot anymore), so it will give you a good intro to the whole PHP ecosystem. Shopware is also pretty popular now, and once you get a hold of Magento, the switch shouldn't be that hard if you decide to learn more e-commerce solutions. 1000 hours does seem a lot, but I guess you will spend a lot of those hours building custom extensions, etc., and building on the skills you've learned at the beginning of the training. Also, 1000 hours translates to roughly six months, so don't worry about overspecialization! :) It all boils down if that's something you find interesting, but money-wise, it's definitely not the worst idea.