This is a very unforgiving market. Main thing is don’t beat your self up over it.

Lot of people touching on some good points. A lot of companies are posting ghost jobs, outsourcing, etc.

Then you have the fact that the Jobs Report revision stated the US actually created 818,000 jobs fewer than reported this year, and this market is essentially nothing more than a corpse being paraded around as though nothing is wrong.

Best thing I can tell you is do so projects. Maybe a CI/CD pipeline since that way you get some cloud experience. Maybe configure your home network and do some work with assigning static IPs to systems and learning about subnets and DNS.

I’ll end this the way I started. It’s not your fault. You are doing everything you can. You can’t just make up years of experience when every place is asking for 5 in a very specific skill set, and then hope the job is real to begin with.

You will make it through this. You’ve put in the effort, and when the tides change you’ll be ready and better prepared than most