I've almost 5 years of experience in networking field. I'm about to finish deep learning certifications from Udacity and Coursera. Will try to come up with a portfolio with whatever I have learnt shortly. Would this help in a career change in deep learning? I've no experience in ML and I started these certifications just as a hobby. But they were really good and so I want to have a career in it. Inputs are highly appreciated.
Yes it will. But just the online class isn't enough. If you're genuinely interested in the topic, then go for it
Can't comment on how much the courses will help. But Deep Learning is the most exciting thing that's happened to AI in a long time. OP, you're on the right track - it'll be a great career.
Man, online courses almost never help with getting a new job. I would strongly discourage joining a company if they give you a job based on a Udacity degree. Since you're trying to move to a completely new area, what will help is 1 or 2 real projects where people can see completed working output (for example, a working classifier or machine translation to your mother tongue hosted on a website), or open source contributions in a project people recognize. When I was trying to switch to jobs into deep learning, I did a project of my own and put it on a website. Got offers I liked. It helped that a few news articles wrote about it as well, but I was able to get offers even before news picked it up.
Where did you get these offers from? I did the same thing and nobody cared about it except Microsoft core ai and aws ai.
Startups which were trying to do something similar to my project. Although, in hindsight, AWS and MSFT Core AI showing interest is more valuable than startups.