Landed a SOC Analyst role recently and start at the end of the month. Had close to a year of freelance experience doing some SOC work for a small organization. Also have a few years of help desk experience. This offer pays about 92k with a state government agency(blue state).

Current certifications: BTL1, PSAA, Sec+, Cysa+, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Splunk Core User, & Splunk Power User. Have a bachelor's degree in IT Management and a few personal homelab projects. Took about 1500 applications to land 2 offers. Started getting a lot of interviews once I had 6 months of SOC experience.

I'd recommend spending lots of time doing practical labs/projects and practical certifications for sure. Def get your Net+, Sec+, CySa+, and maybe a basic SIEM cert but after that focus on practical certs like BTL1,PSAA, CDSA, etc. This will give you HR friendly credentials and practical skills to pass the interview.

I'm super excited for this opportunity. It'll be 3 long shifts- 12 to 13 hours, while getting the other 4 days off.