First couple years of experience tend to pay poorly in this industry because some people can’t program novel solutions well despite credentials. A degree demonstrates knowledge of theory but doesn’t guarantee ability to apply it regularly. The first job is the hardest to get and I’ve heard it said, while I tend to agree, take any first job you can for a year or so. It makes switching fairly easy but will likely be not great. 2010 US based college dropout here but with a good job since a one year each of two rough personal growth jobs.

I’ve got the devops associate and I would probably pass and instead just deploy a couple apps using terraform or cloudformation with some boto3 and put it in github. It could help land your first job in the devops space though if that’s a concern. In practice I find the certification path to be very AWS specific things and many companies will be avoiding the ultra managed services services for core apps as the lock in is quite high and there’s nearly-as-managed services which keep your app more portable.