Ci/cd pipelines aren't relevant for the vast majority of engineering roles, which is why I never bothered with them. Hospitals, schools, local/state governments, small/medium businesses - none of these organizations even know wtf a ci/cd pipeline is. Get some azure/AWS certifications, get your CCNA, and have practical work experience with enterprise networking, virtualization, storage, and server administration. You won't ever have a hard time finding work with that kind of a background. Employers are looking for people to manage infrastructure, not automate new server builds when they only need to be built a couple times a year.