[knbknb]

Your question was asked many times on Quora, and ML celebrity-scientist Andrew Ng himself contributed some answers.

See all of his answers here: https://www.quora.com/profile/Andrew-Ng

I like this one of his answers: for people with intermediate skills, read an ML paper and try to reproduce it, or use it with different/your own datasets. This is completely underrated.

I for one want to do this more.

[jgalt212]

Sound advice. Even better if you have domain expertise and can code up a decent ML solution based on your particular domain expertise, you can get a job on the dev side and not the labeling side.