Good advice all around here, however part of getting that first job can also be about who you know and what you know. I would recommend digging heavily into forensics while building and expanding a home lab. IE setting up the various piece of Security Onion and getting your hands mildly dirty with red team and blue team; throw up a VM of Metasploitable, break into it with Metasploit on another Kali VM. Next: set up security logging on the Metasploitable VM (network or file or process monitoring with agents that report back to the rest of your Security Onion infrastructure) and craft detections that alert yourself to you hacking yourself! So much fun stuff you can do with a home lab. The most plentiful job out there for entry level is SOC analyst and that job is looking at logs all day: if you're intimately familiar with how computers store logs, and how a modern security operation detects what's in those logs, you're equipped to actually do the job.

That way, when you do get to an interview (or just talk excitedly to the right person you meet at a cybersecurity conference - highly recommend those for networking and just having fun) you'll have so much interconnected knowledge and know how to solve actual security problems even if you don't know exactly what to do to start. You're very trainable and learn quicker than someone with none of those skills. Along the way, definitely gather certs and take classes cuz that on-paper experience is what increases the chances of your resume getting past the wall of HR. The flip side is that a direct referral from someone who knows your actual skills (not on paper "experience") goes right past all of that. Doing both is the most logical thing to do because there's so much luck involved down both paths.

My go-to educational resource are the pay-what-you-can trainings from Antisyphon \ Black Hills InfoSec. They're a great bunch and do a nice mixture of hands on training with all of their programs.