I studied electrical engineering in college. I'm finishing grad school now. My work for the past several years has been at the intersection of classical control and machine learning. More of the latter, actually.

I can pick up new, and maintain old "soft"-ware skills (programming languages, algorithms etc.) pretty much by reading online and running demos on a computer. I feel like I can keep abreast of latest skills needed to hire a software engineer.

How do I do the same with "hard"-ware skills? I studied VLSI design, circuits, and embedded systems programming in college. Many of these require expensive software or bespoke apparatus or a longer setup. Unsurprisingly, they do not have the same amount of flashy online demos that more web-dev-adjacent fields like CS have.

This question was prompted by the recent article here[1]. It talks about the decline in EE graduates over time, in favor of more software-oriented fields.

Any time-tested advice?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32142711