We just hired a SWE turned Data Engineer. You don't need to handle massive data to make the transition. I believe all the person did was build a small but robust pipeline that took some API response data, cleaned it, populated some sqlite dbs, replicated it for a small team to use and kept it updated every few days automatically.
That's good news for me. For a minute, I genuinely thought I'd have to waste time going through a bunch of stuff I already knew to learn a tiny bit and earn a certificate to prove my skills.
