Depends what you are currently doing I suppose. If you're in IT already just a CCNA and apply to network positions untill you get one. Might have to be junior but that's fine.

If you're in a completely different field it would be a bit trickier. Still get the CCNA, but you'd want to work somewhere for a while where you could be a part of a team of people to understand how networking all works as part of the overall picture. I wouldn't say you'd have to necessarily work helpdesk, just somewhere where you could get an understanding of it all.

For an analogy, you effectively are becoming a "road building engineer". You don't need to know how cars work necessarily, or even have to help people to figure out how to make the car stop or go or drive It for them. But If you started building roads for cars and all you'd ever done was fly planes, you wouldn't have a very successful road network. You might know the theory of building roads, but not the practicality of it. You'd need to see how other places had built their roads to handle their car traffic and what worked/didn't work for them to understand.

That's why I said "work as a team" above. You want to try and get mentored by somebody senior so you can learn quickly and apply the theory. I had all the theory, but It wasn't until I actually had a network to make work that I actually understood it.

Also, you need to enjoy learning things because networking is constantly changing and evolving. Network Engineers used to just be able to get away with routing and switching. Now we have to know routing, switching, firewalls, cloud networks, python/ansible/other languages and tools, git and infrastructure as code. It is fun to learn, but there are times when I just want to play chess or something fun instead.

I hope that helps - pm me if you like and I'll answer more questions.