Honestly, go with Option A. Since youre aiming for a junior role, tech skills are your entry ticket. I remember my first AI interviews in Chicago years ago. I thought my presentation skills would save me, but I got absolutely grilled on PyTorch and model deployment. If you can't pass the technical screening, you won't even get the chance to talk to stakeholders. Im really happy with how my career progressed once I nailed the coding fundamentals. For juniors, teams want someone who can actually ship code and debug. You wont be leading high-level strategy meetings just yet, and that is totally fine. I used Manning Publications Deep Learning with PyTorch Book back then and it worked well for my prep, honestly no complaints about going heavy on the tech side first. You can easily practice communication for free. Write blog posts about your projects or explain your code out loud to a rubber duck. Save that $500 for the hard tech skills. Once you land the job, you will have plenty of time to learn the corporate speak. Double down on PyTorch, build a solid portfolio, and show them you can build stuff.

TL;DR: Save your cash. Unfortunately, bootcamps are not as good as expected. What's your current programming experience? You might just need Packt Publishing Python Machine Learning 3rd Edition for cheap.

Unfortunately, those tech communication bootcamps are not as good as expected. I had issues with one and got zero value. For a junior role, focus on coding but save your cash. Try these instead:

• O'Reilly Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn Keras and TensorFlow 3rd Edition for math and coding
• Kaggle notebooks to see real production code Hit me up if you want some mock interview prep help!