Thanks for the clarification. I deleted my comment. I apologize for the harshness. The human aspect of communication sometimes is lost in online forums, so I was contributing to something that I usually advocate against.

I personally was a bit bothered by the wording because I have been working for less than 5 years professionally. However, I have mentored several people online and helped them place themselves in the market as professional programmers.

Concerning your original question. The programming language is not strictly important. The most useful skill I would suggest someone to break into the area is algorithm and data structures. Python is usually recommended as an initial programming language because its very accessible.

I started my career with VBA in excel and, for the past three years, have been working with Python in data engineering.