Trying to go entry right in to Security is a recipe for failure. You’d only be able to find something on a large security team that’s wanting to underpay and security teams are generally small, low turnover affairs, the entry level jobs are scarce.

Now let’s talk entry level IT.

Usually this means help desk. It can be other things, but the lions share of entry level IT is help desk.

Let’s say I open a position. Help Desk I. Minimal experience, Minimal pay.
I get 100 resumes immediately.

Let’s play the what’s in my inbox game.

50 of them are zero effort generic carbon copies from a resume template. No certs, no experience, no or unrelated work history. 30 of them are some effort, I make excel sheets, I’m an exec assistant, No certs, but some semi-related experience with basic office apps. 10 of them list every technology that exists, no certs, no experience but they list that they know how to do everything under the sun. 5 of them will have a small amount of real experience 5 of them will be straight out of college with no experience.

The first 50 are out.
The next 30 I’ll weed through. If they read genuinely and show intelligence, I’ll pick some of the best ones for a phone screen. The 10 that list everything are straight up trash. I’ve phone-screened hundreds of those. As soon as you ask them any questions past what is DNS, they fall apart and start just swearing they they can do anything. The 5 with experience are worth a phone screen. probably 1:20 is a reasonable candidate The 5 straight out of college are probably worth a phone screen, but they’re looking for greater than starting wages, and the chances of getting a couple years out of them is slim, they just need the experience to get on to their next gig.

If someone comes in with little experience but has certs, especially Microsoft certs, I’ll always call them. Those certs are hard to get and they’re pretty relevant. It’s no sure thing, but it’s a damn good indicator.

You should be able to install windows, have a working knowledge of replacing/upgrading drivers, googling for and finding/editing/creating keys in the registry, reading windows logs, you should know where the various AppData folders are and what their purposes are. How do you put something into auto start, how do you find all the different things in auto start to disable them? Go find all the health dashboards for the different services (Azure, AWS, Office 365) know where they are so you can use them as examples for practical questions. Be able to open a command window with admin privileges and know why you’d need to do that. Basic wired network card setup.

Go sign up for a free account on Spiceworks. Set up a fake help desk. Work on workflows, create and resolve tickets. Go over every feature for a couple days.

Go get some trash parts, put together a working pc. If nothing else, just get a old pc, strip and clean it then reassemble it, you just need a screwdriver and tiny fingers :)

All this extra curricular stuff, it’s all for the resume. No lies. Be clear but don’t be too wordy. I’m looking to leave my current field of [x] and enter the IT field. list out the things you’ve done and worked with in the name of job preparation. When they read your resume, you need to sound like you’re interested, dedicated, and are ready to take initiative.

In interviews, own that you do not know things. I don’t know how to do that, I’d start with a web search with the following keywords [x,y,z]. If I had to take a guess without looking it up, i’d probably say it was [whatever you can come up with].