Hi! I passed my Machine Learning Engineer exam a few months ago and am looking to get some hands on experience. However, I am unsure what to start with, any advice for someone with a fairly low budget?
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Hello @Avel,
Well, first of all, congratulations for passing your exam 
I would say it all depends on what you’re looking for. ML Engineer can mean a lot of things:
- (true) MLE: Building Models
- MLOps: Operating Models
Note that the two are not mutually exclusive, but depending on the (size of ?) company you’re going to work for, you may do one more than the other. Also, I would say that an MLE is necessarily proficient in advanced maths, whereas MLOps is much more technical.
Since you’re asking this question on Google Cloud, I’m going to assume that you’re looking for GCP-related experience.
So, I would say that the best way to have hands-on experience is:
- Get an entry-level/junior job as MLE/MLOps, depending on what you’re looking for
- Prior to that, you can try to participate in open-source projects by finding related platforms (Open Source Forge, Discord, Reddit, GitHub)
- Or participate in Hackathons
- Learn by doing with Google Cloud Training, Skill Boost Arcade, Courses on Udemy
- Aim for GCP Certifications
- Create by yourself anything that you enjoy
- Read Tech Forums (this one, reddit, whatever)
- Build a blog/portfolio based on all of the above
To me, the simplest way is to get an entry-level job with a company that has an appealing offer for you. It’s best to take longer to find a good job (if you can) than being stuck in a soul-sucking one that may lock you for a while with uninteresting/obsolete technologies.
ATM, the job market seems bad, especially for juniors. That said, ML and/or Cloud are still growing fast. If you’re looking at working with GCP, you may be interested in looking at the GCP Partner Directory that regroups all official companies that are validated by Google as GCP partners.
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Okay, thank you very much!