Yes, for a beginner, it would take a few years of hard, dedicated work - or maybe two decades of more casual hobbying around - to reach a point where you could think about working with such high-voltage, high-current power electronic part. Then you become a power electronics beginner - and as the first thing you blow up that part

. So you need replacements to keep going. It IS theoretically possible to do power electronics without blowing up parts but that requires so much expertise, knowledge and self-discplicine that it's impossible to avoid blowing parts while still learning.
For example, I started "hobbying" electronic things somewhere 1992 at age 7 (initially it was just playing around with components like kids do, doing dummy projects that have no chances of working), built microcontroller-based simple projects controlling LEDs and motors and whatnot somewhere 1999, and built my first IGBT-based high-voltage (400V), high-current (200A) inverters for conversion electric vehicles somewhere 2012. Even then I blew up the first few IGBTs. Maybe I needed negative gate drive or better miller clamp?? The sad thing is that the blown semiconductor doesn't tell you
why it blew and as there are about half a dozen of different possibilities, I still don't know.
If you are a very bright mind, you could be faster to learn than I was, but I doubt there would be an order of magnitude difference.
So, just start smaller! If you are interested in power electronics, get a cheap function generator and drive some smallish (say 50V, 10A parts) MOSFETs with it, building basic prototypes of buck, boost, maybe flyback!
You CAN use that IGBT to do lower voltage circuits as well, but the efficiency sucks because the voltage drop in on-state is somewhere around 2-3V, not a problem when you have 500V available, but a large percentage of say 12V. The good news is, if you attach a say 10kOhm pull-down resistor between gate and emitter to prevent ESD damage, you don't easily blow that beast up when running with lab supplies / power bricks at safety extra-low voltages.