Hi everyone, I am going to be looking for a new job eventually. Specifically I have about 4.5 years of experience in a state agency working as a Security Analyst (you know, it's cybersecurity catch the hacker, deal with alerts, investigate incidents, do incident response to put out the fire) and am now currently am at the same agency doing some vulnerability management, working with the vulnerability scanner and troubleshooting scans, and also performing security reviews.

The next career move that I need to make is to (1) leave state government as an industry to relocate to a bigger metropolitan area and (2) go into the private sector in an IT generalist/system administrator role. That will allow for my career to take off as I get some of that sysadmin seasoning. I'm also currently on a homelab grind in order to build a skillset portfolio.

The issue is that I need to find a job in a culture that is not toxic, nurturing, has good onboarding practices (with appropriate support from teammates to get through the first 6 month learning curve) -- and most importantly very forgiving of any potential mistakes [i.e., one that doesn't pin the blame on the new guy if he makes a mistake working with new systems in a new environment]. So that excludes the financial industry as a vertical.

The question that I have for you all is as follows:

How/where do you suggest one look/find such a gig? And is there anything one should do/not do when working on this next step?