[taway_1212]

Just a though - if you want to eventually move to games/simulation anyway, why not teach yourself C and program some not entirely trivial 3D graphics demo using OpenGL/Direct3D? This is not easy (both C and the APIs are fairly difficult and obscure) and would give me a lot of confidence in you having chops to be a professional coder. One of the advantages of this task as a "rite of passage" is that it cannot be winged by just copying snippets from tutorials/stackoverflow until stuff works. Plus, for a move to games you'd probably need to do this eventually away.

[MsgingABottle]

This is a great idea! Definitely feels outside my current skill set—which has mostly come from working with Unity and C#—but seems like a good, attainable, challenging way to put some work in toward that end. Thanks for the advice!