Very good pointers. I would like to get in touch with you regarding how you transitioned to ML. I don't see a contact info in the profile. My email is in my profile. Pls let me know.
Kaggle is more than enough to get started. I would hire anyone who's Master there. Probably not even need for Master, just enough knowledge to explain why that thing work and that would not.
See this course to get into Kaggle: https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitive-data-science