How to change your specialty?

Question

IT education

Hello.
The essence of the question is what movements with the lowest costs and risks allow you to migrate from engineering (aerospace development / design activities) to IT?
Prerequisites - from the middle courses he replaced two aviation and missile enterprises, he has grown to the 1st category. About a year and a half ago, it became clear that further work in the specialty is gradually losing prospects (increased bureaucratization and accountability to the state customer, the predominance of administrative and financial (support of contracts, evaluation and planning of labor costs, etc., etc.) duties , "tightening the screws" in the part of the mode).
From the information area - there is a backlog in terms of writing fairly large (~ 1500 - 2000 lines of code), but _very_ specific software, which, for example, calculate the parameters of orbital motion or determine by approximate (method of local cones / wedges + Newton) methods of characterizing the aircraft . The main language is Object Pascal, along the way there are works on VBA and FORTRAN dialects of different antiquity. "For myself" a few years ago, at the first place of work, I began to study HTML / CSS. Somewhere a couple of years ago, JS was added to this bunch (so far, native, without DzhKverri) and LESS. Now PHP has also been added (+ work with the database / ajax).
The main focus of our own projects is various experiments with the visualization of various computational processes (cellular automata, simulation models, fractals), graphics.
And now - questions.

1. How important is it to study not only "native" technologies, but also frameworks based on them? How justified is employment with basic skills (HTML + CSS / LESS / SVG + JS / AJAX + PHP / sql) and the study of specific tools (frameworks / development environments) already directly in the workflow?
   
2. What exactly to prepare for when talking with a potential employer (prev. front-end) - syntax / tasks with an implicit solution / knowledge of esoteric language nuances / search for errors in the proposed code samples?
   
3. It so happened that the programs created at the main workplace are intended for grinding a large amount of digital data and have a very minimalistic interface, so it is difficult to assemble a colorful portfolio from them. How to present previously made projects to potential employers (is there an option to make a brief extract from the reports written for these programs + embed the results of processing the results of test problems in TecPlot/MathCAD)?
   
4. Rather, an optional point is how to add some graphic work to the coding in terms of design / animation of individual elements (SVG / manipulation with Canvas + JS) and creating illustrations. Where can this be in demand, what else should you know and be able to do in such places?
   

Thank you in advance for your attention.

Answer 1

Can I have a question? Why is migration to IT an immediate entry into web development? Is it a conscious choice in accordance with your interests or just this area caught your eye more often? Maybe you should look towards the development of civil embedded systems? Or software development for process control systems? Undoubtedly, there are an order of magnitude fewer such vacancies than vacancies for web developers, but your experience in these areas will come in handy.

Answer 2

You can move towards data analysis, programming is quite simple there - python and R mostly, and with your knowledge of mathematics it will not be too difficult, the money is very good, you can start here: https://www.coursera.org/ specializations/machine l...

Answer 3

You have every chance to get in very easily and quickly. Go right now to some company (show your resume, ask to be trained ("I think they will agree")) and there are not necessarily other interesting industries on the web. With your abilities, employers will tear you by the arms and legs)) BigData DataAnalisist etc

Answer 4

the_stucky , there was already an answer to a similar question here - read and understand what is written there.
For a full understanding, I advise you to read also:
1. here ;
2. and here ;
3. Or maybe you are on this direction . For the experience of organizational activity is already there. After reading, understanding, go through the education
tag again

Answer 5

You would be in Machine Learning and not in the frontend, which the rest of the monkeys can.
To immediately join, I recommend taking the course https://studio.azureml.net/ , reading about machine learning on Wikipedia and literature from wiki references.