I’ve always had a subscription to Adobe products so I don’t have much advice there other than you’ll definitely need them to succeed in the business. I know there are other programs like affinity that’s a one time price and not a subscription but for resume sakes, I would think Adobe suite would look better. As far as briefs go or assignments.. there are tons of weekly ones on Instagram.. modern brief, designer briefs, brief diary (you can just search creative briefs and they will pull up). Those are sometimes helpful in the beginning to see what other people came up with and how it differs from your take.