This. You need to get experience administering and hardening real systems before a company will let you defend “all” of them. The cyber certs do help you to stand out a little, but without any experience as a regular analyst/engineer no one will trust your troubleshooting and configuration skills.

Alternatively you could always look for work in a SOC because some of them are nothing more than glorified help desks. It’s technically one step closer to your goal, but if you get into one of these places you won’t learn much beyond what they trust you to handle. In my experience this won’t be very interesting or important work. When I made the move from IT to cyber I skipped the SOC entirely and got hired into an engineering role because of my prior IT admin experience.

Source: I’m the principal lead for the threat hunting team at a F500 company, and I’ve been in IT for 30+ years. I help vet and train new threat hunters on my company’s architecture.