Confused on Data Analysis Career Path

I started off learning about data analysis through Googles Data Analytics Certificate program on Coursera. I felt like it gave me a pretty solid foundation but knew I would have to build on it, and that it wouldn’t alone get me a job. Since then I’ve done a few case studies, some just taking clean data and analyzing and visualizing it, and some starting by gathering the data and cleaning it myself. I have experience with Tableau, Excel, Sheets, SQL, Python, R, and feel pretty comfortable using all of these. I have a portfolio showcasing what I can do for work. I have six years of experience working in healthcare and a bachelor’s degree, but I can’t land a job in data analysis.

So far I’ve only had one interview, and it was for a pretty low paying position, but most of the interview questions were about machine learning algorithms (which I know nothing about). I am unsure if this is par for the course (I figure it’s not and they were trying to get a data scientist for the price of an underpaid junior data analyst).

I don’t know where to go from here. I’ve been doing the courses on Kaggle to learn about machine learning, although I do understand they do not cover the theory behind machine learning and more the implementation of it. I am not sure where to go from here in my learning journey, and don’t know why I am having such a hard time with landing an interview. Any advice of what to do would be greatly appreciated because I definitely feel a bit lost.