I was laid off from my job a few years ago (network monitoring) and decided I would use the unemployment to change careers. Been a rails dev for 3+ years now, so I will convey what worked for me.
The requirements for a full stack rails developer are not what i would consider low. I don't think they're unreasonable, but there's a lot involved.
Sorry, this devolved into general "new dev" advice / what you need to learn; hope its helpful.
1. Watch railscasts - try to watch all of them. Make it your new TV show. You don't need to "get" everything, you just need exposure/familiarity.
2. Have ideas and ideas of how to build them.
3. Build things full stack - such as one of your ideas. be someone that gets things done. this also means that you'll face problems (like search, caching, uptime) that you'll have to solve in your side projects, that will give you experience to use professionally.
4. Deploy to a server via capistrano. You should also know how how to do heroku, but you'll be more useful if you can setup and deploy to a live server.
5. Understand testing; either test_unit or rspec - it depends on you which you prefer. familiarity with both isnt a bad idea either. You should develop a sense of testing philosophy - not everything has the same testing priority. But you absolutely should know how to test in unit and functional full-stack - testing is a big deal in ruby/rails.
6. watch the "is TDD dead?" talks with DHH, martin fowler, and kent beck.
7. learn git & github. I recommend "git essentials training" on lynda.com
8. dig into ruby - after you know the basics, "the well grounded rubyist" by david black is a great read, and gives you insight into the nuances of ruby.
9. "design patterns in ruby" by obie fernandez is good - i'd save for after #8 at the least, it's fairly high level and you certainly won't need it in the beginning - more a mid-level book.
10. ruby tapas is great for little nuggets of ruby that can be insightful to know.
10. Sandi metz is wicked smart - any of her talks online or books are worth checking out.
11. checkout jobs on sites like weworkremotely.com and see what kinda stack people roll with to gauge what you need to know.
12. learn an editor, like sublime or rubymine or whatever floats your boat. For sublime, i recommend "perfect workflow in sublime text 2" on tuts+. you don't need to be a master, but there are little tricks you'll learn that can help you be more efficient.
13. stay humble and curious. It is far too easy for a developer to think they are smart and write amazing code and that they don't need to do or use X because they know better. I speak both of my own experiences, and what I witness from others.
14. Embrace change. How we build web apps is evolving and you should try to stay with the times. How rails 2.x got things done is different from how rails 4 does things.
15. Be conservative. This is somewhat contrary to #14, but that's because there is a balance to be struck. Neither as an extreme is healthy. You should be reaching for pre-existing design patterns or whats built into rails, before reinventing the wheel, or pulling in a gem. If you do, have a good reason.