This is very true. I can't give you much advice on getting a job yet because I don't have one myself. I'm still learning, like I said. But when it comes to gaining experience, here's something you can try. I'm about to start an internship at the data centre of the university I graduated from. They never advertised the opportunity, and most people don't even know the university has a data centre. Most universities do, btw. Look for companies and institutions with network infrastructure in your area. Reach out, and I'd advise you to make these enquiries in person rather than online. Start with universities, CBT centres and banks, then branch out from there. Banks, for example, rely on network infrastructure to connect their branches to central banking systems and keep their services running. Sometimes, the opportunities are there. You just have to find them and shoot your shot.

Network engineering feels so difficult to learn because people spend too much time reading about it and not enough time actually doing it. Most concepts I read about seem foreign to me until I configure them on a physical switch and see how they work in real time. I'm not saying networking isn't hard, but the more I practice, the more things click, and the more I enjoy it. If you don't have physical equipment, please download Cisco Packet Tracer and start building networks. Configure VLANs, practice routing, assign IP addresses, break things and troubleshoot them. Don't just read about networking when you can experiment with it yourself. You can build entire network topologies and practice a huge range of concepts without spending money on hardware. Physical equipment will still teach you things Packet Tracer can't, but it's a great place to start. I'm nowhere close to being a professional network engineer, and I still have a lot to learn. I'm just glad I got to work with physical equipment early instead of spending all my time reading PDFs about how networking works.