I have one of the early PhDs in neural network based machine learning - completed in 1992. My biggest problem back then was that only a few people in the entire

I have one of the early PhDs in neural network based machine learning - completed in 1992. My biggest problem back then was that only a few people in the entire world even know what a neural network was - so I was a little head of the curve :-) Thankfully however, I was able to get a job in a networking group at IBM Research on the basis of some distributed systems work that I had done in the process of creating my neural network training code. You have to recall how slow computers were thirty years ago so I needed a lot of them to train my networks. Anyway, I was completely out of the machine learning field for nearly 15 years until the late 2000s when interest in the field started to pick up again. The main advice I can offer is to be flexible and bide your time.