[brudgers]

My take is that a university education is likely to be the simplest and most high probability path to achieving professional engineering competence. Sure it's possible to autodidact anything. But doing so requires creating the structure and metrics on top of just learning all the things a professional ought to know at a time when a person lacks the knowledge to determine what a professional ought to know.

To your advantage, unlike many people entering an engineering curriculum, there's already an interest and some hands on practical experience and knowledge. To your disadvantage, part of the motivation appears to be status conferred by a title/degree [these don't directly translate into competence]. I suspect that the former outweights the latter, and that is a net positive.

In the end, vocational training tends to lead to vocational careers and professional training tends to lead to professional careers.

Good luck.