DigitalGhost

The problem is that to get that experience requires time in the office and often plenty of it. You can work your way through as many certifications and online courses as you want but they will never be able to replace professional work experience. I've never worked in a single place that did things by the text book and that's personally why I gave up on certifications a while ago.

I've been told by my current employer that they want me to do an AWS one. That's fine if they want to pay for it I suppose but I'm not willing to give up my own time and money for a vendor cert at this point.

Moving upwards in IT can be difficult enough especially since good help desk people can be hard to find and you will see a lot of recruiters and HR people hell bent on keeping you where you are, even if that means paying you over the odds for it. If you want to gain more experience in infrastructure or development then that's great but it will require sacrifice. I've literally seen guys in their 40's still doing help desk work because they could earn a decent contract rate and had abandoned any ideas of progressing upwards at that point.

Those digital nomads in Thailand and elsewhere are usually either seasoned coders from the west who can demand a decent rate because they earned years of onsite experience and have a great portfolio and some personal contacts under their belt or they're Indians and Philippinas earning way below the market rate for low end projects and on extremely tight deadlines. I doubt you'd really want to join the ranks of the latter group.

TLDR; unless you're the next Sergei Brin, Alexey Pajitnov or Mark Zuckerberg then it's highly unlikely that you're going to find your fortune from behind a laptop while sitting on a beach in Mallorca.