How do I get to the next level? Senior engineering, more responsibility, better pay etc

Yo networking vets and gurus, I’m in desperate need of some advice on how to advance in the field.

I’ve been in IT for 8 years now doing a variety of salaried and contract jobs ranging from SMB network administrator to NOC L1 to Wan engineer at a F500.

I’m a paper CCNP earned through nights and weekends with Gns3/eve-ng but unfortunately my realworld experience with most protocols has been limited. I was finally able to implement BGP and OSPF in my last my job(contract) before being laid off due to rona.

Im currently in a contract doing cyber security administration but I really wanna utilize my core skillset which is network engineering.

The hard part is every position that pays a decent wage(100k+) is “senior” requiring years of MPLS, BGP, DATACENTER, VoIP and vpn/IPSec knowledge with cloud infrastructure/programming languages thrown in for good measure.

Many people say apply any way, and I’ve made it to first round interviews but talking about my GNS3 experience doesn’t inspire confidence and I keep getting passed over for more upper echelon guys(20+ years in the game/military XP) because networking is such a mature field.

I’m at loss y’all, companies want everyone to hit the ground running and I’ve considered taking a pay cut to find a mid/junior engineering role so I can get more experience. I have a family now and 70k isn’t gonna cut it anymore. I need the big bucks and my wife wants a big truck.

I’ll post my resume as well, let me know or what I can improve. Thanks for any and all advice.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1Jhihm3IUQf6X3GHkNlo-3rVcO5GSLfGk/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=msword