Or through a free online course like deeplearning.ai or fast.ai, and a few personal projects.
So many PhDs I've worked with have known the literature but couldn't produce something valuable to save their life. That might have been the nature of them being over billed on projects and spread too thin, but I do not think that is a requisite for building models. It certainly isn't for the rest of the engineering pipeline.
It depends on what company you're going for. If you are looking for a role in cutting-edge ML (FAANG/OpenAI/Deepmind/etc), the stuff you learn from these online courses does not provide the theoretical rigor required.
If you want a role in a small company building best-effort, out-of-the-box models, then the courses are plenty fine.
So many PhDs I've worked with have known the literature but couldn't produce something valuable to save their life. That might have been the nature of them being over billed on projects and spread too thin, but I do not think that is a requisite for building models. It certainly isn't for the rest of the engineering pipeline.