One way is to go the certifications route. CNCF has good ones. Various cloud providers also have some.
And you can rent one or two virtual machines and try to reproduce the concepts you are learning along the way. Nothing beats practice.
Yeap
Start as a regular engineer – be good at it, people will give you more responsibility, be good at it – soon you will be a product engineer, and be an all singing, all dancing, one girl band.