oracle 12g xe,Oracle XE 12c / 18c

Would strongly suggest the "try it out now" approach to learn DDL (definition language) (create table|index|function|...), sequences, triggers to do the equivalent of an MSSQL identity column, etc. Could be a while before 18c XE goes GA (General Availability).

Get some practise managing an instance, that's the intent behind XE. The lack of patching makes an XE install a less than optimal choice for app(s) opened to general public access, although the lack of several EE or SE features does not rule it out as a decent learning platform. Get familiar with archivelog mode, hot, cold, RMAN and user-managed backups, and try a restore (or several, practise makes one closer to perfect) and PIT (Point In Time) recovery. Many questions needing experience to answer capably, and patience- it will take a good stretch of time to go from Jr. DBA to professional level- perhaps a year, or more.

Having had several Former Esteemed Colleagues with experience starting out on MSSQL or one of the many other RDBMS engines, learning Oracle forces one to get a deeper understanding of the inner workings of an RDBMS.  No disparagement intended here, but have seen folks that started on MSSQL struggle when faced with a move to Oracle. And some of the EE features eg. flashback can be quite handy in an urgent restore scenario, not something to start looking into when its badly needed- it can shave a significant chunk of time from a hard|unplanned downtime window.

For an upgrade to 18c, many ways to handle that. For a 20GiB or smaller instance, I'd suggest a datapump export of the schema(s), shutdown, install 18c with its new empty instance and datapump import the 11g dump file. And try several datapump schema export(s)|import(s) while waiting for 18c XE to become available. Datapump docs are in the Utilities book at https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/nav/portal_booklist.htm