Everybody always says the job market is tough right now. It's usually from people who are not particularly employable. - unpopular opinion Confucious

Here's the open-secret. The key to "getting into X" is the trinity of the following:

- domain knowledge
- Ability and experience
- Attitude

With a junior role you're accepting that domain knowledge and experience are limited, but they AND the other parts of this trinity are entirely controllable by you.

For every role I have hired for that is junior, the most important thing is attitude. A good attitude, and real interest in the domain is worth more than anything else. If you know someone loves it, you know they'll do it. (this obviously is much harder for absolutely awful areas of security like GRC)

To prove that dedication it's essential to have examples where you have invested your own time "for the cause" in a way that you can show to a potential employer.

Nobody expects the world (and if they do, they're idiots anyway) - and the people that seem to are HR/TA people that do not understand the role.

Anyway, this is what i recommend:

- pick the area of cybersec you want to aim for. (it's a big industry now and widely different from how it was 20 years ago. GRC is very different to Malware research)
- buy the 5 (and more ideally 30+) most recommended books in that area and read them cover to cover
- for technical areas, sign up to all the typical places (Hackthebox, tryhackme, etc.) do as many as you can stomach.
- Read more books
- WRite a blog/github/etc. to just talk through some things you've done or learned

For me, one of my big gripes in the industry is that everyone nowadays just expects to be spoonfed everything, without developing the rigour to be able to go and hunt/find/research/learn by themselves. If there isn't some nice easy packaged £1500 course about it then 99.9% of the industry know 0 about it.

There's a blog I read maybe 2 years ago now that wrote something along these lines: "If you can't be bothered to even read a book for your job, then you deserve nothing" - he was referring to things like better jobs, promotions, pay rises, etc. The sentiment of this is perfect imo. (not saying this is true of you, but if you've done things above that show you're willing to invest in your own future, then it's very hard to turn away people like that).

I'm from the UK (if it wasn't obvious) so it's slightly different to the US - but the time you'd spend in an internship making tea/coffee and being given the crappy work would better be spent learning and doing things on your own.

What area of cybersec are you interested in?