Comment by jjude

Read the book Smartcuts and see if you can use one of the 9 ideas the author talks about to move to a new situation (review here: https://www.jjude.com/smartcuts/)

Since you have work experience in backend (doesn't matter java / c#), and AWS certifications, leverage them. I would advice against going to front-end at this moment. FE is comparatively a different beast.

Without knowing lot of your details (your domain, residence etc), here are some options that I could think of (some of which I have done in 30 years of experience).

- move to a company that uses the same tech but in a different domain (say logistics to finance) and then jump from there to a company that uses a modern tech (finance legacy tech to fintech company using rust or go) - within the same domain can you create a portfolio of side projects which are all aligned in some way - say if you are in retail, can you create projects on teraform scripts to deploy .net projects to multi-cloud (gcp, aws, azure); or for supporting blue-green deployment; idea is to use your "modern" knowledge within legacy but creating public portfolio to showcase your "modern" knowledge. - find a local leader that you admire (if you go to city-wide tech conferences or something like that you can find some like this), and ask them if you can help them with something as a side-hustle. They don't have to pay but they have to write a recommendation on LinkedIn for your work. Most tech leaders who talk have some projects going on and they struggle with their time. You can help while building a good portfolio - combination of some of the above

Do a combination of content creation (git projects, video streaming of coding, writing on LinkedIn ...), building a network, and obtaining social proof (recommendations). This will help you get good jobs.

For long term, this is the roadmap I would encourage: https://www.jjude.com/learn-next/

I also wrote about how the jobs are evolving: https://www.jjude.com/future-of-jobs/