Work normal hours for your job then anything extra pushing your skills in areas you find interesting. This can be on tangentially related work tasks or research or skills.

If you find your interests lead away from your job, then that is a path to skilling up for a more appropriate job.

If you think it sucks you have to work so long and hard to find and/or get those interesting jobs it does .

But it's because other people are willing to do this and will get the interesting jobs leaving the boring ones to those that don't.