Help needed PLEASEEE
Hi, I'm a final year student who want to become a penetration tester from my secondary school, for the past 2 years of college I've done multiple things, participated in national and international competitions, built backends, frontends, AI pipelines, cloud infrastructure etc but I didn't got the time to actually pentest some stuff or websites. I have the basics of networking, linux, python etc everything I just wanna get fully involved into the security domain now.
I am currently doing a practical ethical Hacking course by Heath Adams(it won't have a cert coz I got it thru 😜).
My question is can I get a full time job after 9 months and if yes, do I need some certification?
I have certs in mind but I don't have money, I can ask my parents but I need some actual advice on which certifications is the best for money and what are the free alternatives to actually boost my skills to become an actual security engineer rather than a larper or script kiddy...