I've been stuck in this exact same place for the last one year or so. I wanted a job in machine learning or possibly NLP and python is my language of choice, while the language is an excellent tool for these tasks I have not been able to find jobs in ML or NLP possibly because both of these fields involve quite a bit more than the programming related work.

To top this off I live in India and it has been difficult to find quality jobs here; the ones that will hire a less experienced person like me, of course :-)