You will find a ton of educational resources and wonderful networking opportunities here on the site.

Make sure to check out Education for all your REI learning.

I'm relatively new to real estate investing and love the opportunity to be involved in a community of successful real estate investors to bounce ideas off of and increase my education.

IMHO, Lease Purchasing is an awesome investing strategy out there but you need to have a good understanding - which means educating yourself thoroughly and having air-tight contracts.

Go through the education tab along the top and read through all the guides, read through starting out in RE under blog topics, and start listening to all of the podcasts.That will give you a good foundation and show you that there are different niches of real estate, and you will begin to think about your goals, and what you want to get out of real estate and then you'll be well on your way to studying the exact strategy you want to pursue so you can get into real estate.Until you decide what investing strategy / niche you want to get into, you'll be lost in the real estate sauce for a while.For instance...

Great Education, Opportunities and Networking!

There are plenty more resources you can find under Education from how to's, blogs from our experts and podcasts.

I am overseas right now in England and investing...it can happen but educating yourself is key.  

This podcast talks about finding your freedom number to ascertain the cutoff for income sustainability.https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2015/12/03/bp-podcast-151-finding-your-freedom-number-clayton-morris/ http://www.biggerpockets.com/startherehttp://www.biggerpockets.com/meethttps://www.biggerpockets.com/alertsHow to Use @Mentions on BiggerPocketshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/ruleshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/termshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/inviteshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/perkshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/categorieshttps://www.biggerpockets.com/rei/glossary/https://www.biggerpockets.com/webinarLastly, this site thrives on interactions and as such we encourage two way exchanges and look forward to educational and thought provoking ideas relevant to REI.

In CA they require 4 years, they do recognize the education, if you have engineering degree or what not, in that case you still have to get 1 year experience in the trade, maybe not really pounding hammers but at least a supervisory level.