The market over the last 2ish years is significantly worse then it's been over the past 10 years with the exception of Covid due to the rise of interest rates and change in tax incentives. This has hit large companies pretty hard, so there is a double whammy of fewer jobs from the biggest sources and more competition with other engineers. Anecdotally it does seem to be warming up, but it is uneven with significantly longer timelines to get a new position.

So what can you do? 1. Update your LinkedIn with descriptions of all your jobs so it looks similar to your resume. This should include technologies you've worked with. This is basically doing some SEO work so you get inbound recruiter emails (understanding that the quality of those inbounds will vary dramatically). 2. Apply to jobs directly and actually write cover letters (take a look at Who's Hiring, etc).

In terms of new skills or certifications, it's usually easier to add something adjacent to what you already do instead of learning something completely new. If you're a backend engineer, maybe you learn about data pipelines, or cloud infrastructure. If you're a front-end engineer maybe learn to write some backend code using nodejs. Put a side project on your resume, and ideally online.