What is the secret to breaking into Mid Level IT? Whatever im trying isnt working.

It's the age-old problem - if you don't have experience in that kind of role, then they'd rather hire someone with experience than take a gamble on you and try to train you up. The way I got around it when I was younger was to bypass that system entirely, and become a one-man-band. Self-employed, started a business, and when someone said "Hey, I don't suppose you can do X for us, can you?" and the answer is "Yes" when your internal thought is "Never done it, but pretty sure I can" and your experience doing that is... practically zero. And if you're in any way half-decent, that's what happens. And next time you can say "Oh, I had this client who wanted something similar before, shouldn't be a problem". I'm not suggesting that as a career path, by the way, I'm just telling you how I bypassed that entire problem without ever really realising it could be an issue for others. If you're going generalist, you get to find your way. If you're going specialist, you're competing against people who do nothing but that all day long. Doesn't mean that they are BETTER than you (hell, I have any number of stories proving the opposite!). But people see them as less of a gamble than someone with no experience who is trying to shoulder their way into a given specialism. My advice would be: Try not to be so targetted, try to get experience (of any kind) doing those things you want to get into (yes, it's catch-22, I know, but... do stuff at home, etc.). I have a degree, but that just got me in the door. "A guy with a degree said" holds more weight than "some kid who's offering their services said". That's all. But it doesn't compare to "A guy who does this as a specialist career for decades said". When I hire, I don't care about certs. Not one bit. I believe they're largely worthless, backed up by decades of hiring people with and without them. I believe they're used as a smokescreen by people who have just never done that thing more often than they are proving someone is capable of doing that thing. I don't care about degrees, except in one small aspect. The ability to learn. That's all I care about. Someone who is keen to, demonstrates they can, and is able to learn of their own accord. That's more valuable to me than ANYTHING else. Because I know people with degrees as old as mine who just stagnated and never learned. I know people who worked in MSPs and their tiny little carved niche they were "OK" on, but everything else they were useless on. I know people who have certs coming out of their ears but it's because they were out of work and the job centre funded them to get them. I know people with many qualifications and educational achievements that I wouldn't let near my production systems, and that I've even had to say "This person needs to be removed so I can actually fix the problems they've caused". Having an end-career in mind is... suspicious to me. Unless you have a personal history that really indicates that you're so keen for it. The one at the moment is cybersecurity. Everyone wants to be in cybersecurity. Great. So... what do you do about that at home? Give me an example. Have you configured your home network to only login with Yubikeys? Have you set up a VLAN'd off quarantine environment and spend time analysing malware that passes by your systems? What are you DOING about that ultimate aim you have? Because it's so specific... and yet... you've never done it, don't know much about it, and aren't keen for it, and haven't bothered to learn about it. So, to me, that says that you heard cybersecurity has good salaries and you think you can just hop on that bandwagon. Doesn't it sound like that to you? The people I've hired who have done best and who I was prepared to overlook any kind of absence of qualification or certification - they had incredible learning skills, curiosity, and could demonstrate related things really quickly because... they'd already done them at home, or in some previous job, or whatever. The guy who told me he wanted to be a CI engineer... who knew almost nothing about programming, who had never set up a build environment much less a CI one, who knew nothing about source code management or compile farms or containers or anything... who applied to me under a non-CI role and yet had ZERO interest in the code we did have to manage... I was suspicious of him from the start and it didn't work out well. It was just something someone had told him earned good money, he knew NOTHING about it. Hell, I even let him have time to go look up how "those skills you have" could be useful to us, and he came back with nothing because he didn't have those skills at all. Evidence. Demonstration. Not of professional experience, necessarily, but of keenness to learn, understanding of the technology, and that you've tried things out. That's important to me. I can't speak for everyone, sure, but... I want to see something. One guy I hired I hired because he had an interest in tech far older than he was. He was repairing cassette players and record players and aligning CD player lasers and the like. Absolutely nothing to do with our job, or any job he'd ever had. But it showed me that - outside of every job he had ever had - he had an interest, he self-taught, pursued it, was interested in it, and was able to succeed at it (people literally paid him to fix things). That, to me, was more valuable than all the certs he was being made to study at that point. Forget the target job you're aiming for. Forget salaries and future earnings. Show me what you're passionate about, what you can do, what you've CHOSEN TO DO entirely of your own self-will, and which you can demonstrate to me that you have ability to learn even through difficulty. That you have an interest in the topic. That you've done things entirely off your own back, with no help. That... that will get you a foot in the door, at least.