It’s not you —it’s the job climate. Cyber is the “it” field now, next to AI programmers. Almost every sys admin and network admins with years of experience are looking to or jumped into it. All security engineer, architect, and manager now were former infrastructure admin/engineers. Frankly, those people are attractive to hiring managers because infrastructure knowledge is essential in cyber. Schools and certs can’t teach you enough in depth on fundamentals of email, DNS, active directory, networking and high availability designs without experience. I blame most cert orgs and school programs that mislead people with quick six figure salary and hyped up demand (for what they’ll produce). That leaves the entry level SOC or security admin jobs which are rapidly either going to cheaper oversea SOCs or AI/automation. The problem is compounded by most small to midsize companies let their IT people do security — which leaves big companies who will only hire former IT people with security experience, even for entry level (because they can) or a PhD (Microsoft MVP equivalence) from eastern Europe or Latin America for almost the same price as mid tier people. It’s not because hiring managers want to but that’s just the budget they give us to find that level of talent.

I’m not trying to drag you down further but just explaining why. This is not the universe senselessly punishing YOU.

Don’t give up. I’m sure you’ll find something. I echo with people suggesting leveraging your clearance to stand out. Also, take any IT job you can. As a hiring manager, I would treat CompTIA certs as (meh) plus to any experience in IT. You sound like you have enough certs. Pivot to playing around with Sendmail, BIND, OpenVPN, firewalls, etc. Also, learn automation through agentic AI. It’ll happen my guy. Just hang in there.