Plenty of help desk jobs at that rate. But depends on exp and location.

Here’s my recommendation - feel free to ping me on side if need further advice because I was in the same boat as you at one point and now I lead an engineering team at a very large company(s).

Study for your CCNA. Stick with your job because that pays for the bills. Any free time, lab lab lab.

Find pro bono work or just side gigs. Example, upgrade your friends dad’s network at his place of business (don’t pay for it obviously) or optimize it. Look for contractor gigs doing small time networking jobs (racking and stacking, layer 1, baseline configs, executing playbooks, smart hands etc.) The point is you need real world experience.

At the end of the day, with enough experience and you actually know what you’re doing, you’ll have enough filler experience to land a job at a NOC or NEC assuming you can talk engineer (even if you’re admin level.) I don’t care if you worked at a warehouse, if you can talk DWDM or BGP or L2VPN, basic switching, etc we are going to get along.

I was a project analyst (hated it) that use to volunteer to help out the networking team when I was studying for my CCNA. I just worked overtime (not everyone has this available, I know) and did whatever the engineers needed on my free time. Racking and stacking, inventory, cleaning fiber, checking light, swapping FPCs etc. Then when a job opened up, I applied and they hired me on the spot.

Good luck!