It's not unrealistic at all, I'm following that exact career path right now. I spent 6 years developing Wordpress and PHP applications and decided last year that I wanted to become a full stack JS engineer. I found an amazing consulting company who dropped me into React training on day one (having never touched React before). Over the past 7 months since being hired I've built 3 production react apps, am the primary frontend developer for my client's React app and working on a couple internal React/Typescript projects. Finding the right company that is willing to invest in your career development is crucial. Heck, I brought PHP code to my first JS interview and they still hired me. Most importantly, don't be afraid to answer "I don't know". Coming from the land of ES5 and jQuery, I found a couple of things to be most difficult when starting out with React: Webpack. Don't start using create-react-app out of the gate, take the time and suffer through creating your own webpack config from scratch, you'll thank yourself later. Lexical ** this ** and object inheritance. The key to understanding state management and object properties relies on an in-depth knowledge of scope and inheritance. React employs 1-way binding by default which is extremely important when passing properties to child components. React is all about concepts. 90% of building a React app consists of writing pure JS. React itself revolves around the concepts of components, component lifecycle and and state management. learn as much as you can about the fundamentals of those core concepts. Below are a couple great resources to help guide your learning. https://github.com/excellalabs/the-javascript-curriculum https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS https://nodeschool.io/ https://egghead.io/browse/frameworks/react