Two years ago, I created a Discord community for data analysts and we are now 700+ members.
Talking with the community made me realized how lucky I was to have a job and proper experience in data analysis because, god, it is hard right now to find a first job.
So I decided to spend my free time building D8A academy. It's a roadmap of projects, which is what most people in the Discord were asking for. It helps you focus on what you really need to learn to do the day-to-day job, and helps you build a portfolio.
I believe that even if degrees are nice, I learned 95% of my skills by doing, and it is really by building projects and talking about how you achieved them that you can increase your chances of getting hired.
We also added a tool to help you build a data portfolio in 5 minutes.
Most of the app is free, and so is the community, feel free to join. But some features, like the review of your resume or projects by a senior data analyst, take time, and the portfolio feature requires a lot of resources that I can't afford to offer for free.
I hope it will help some new data folks. And if you have ideas I could add to the app, feel free to share them :) I'm still working on it and developing it every day.