[disgruntledphd2]

Not the OP, but ultimately something that increases revenue or decreases costs by some measurable amount.

The best thing you can do to make yourself good at this is to practice. Get some Kaggle data and try to fit a model. Realise your data is crap, clean data, repeat.

Every useful system is hand made in the sense that there's a vast amount of set up and operational code. Mostly the model's the easy part (although it will take so much time to run).