go do stuff and get good enough you feel confident doing something you want to do that you won’t feel dishonest telling people you can do it… it doesn’t matter what this is, it’s mainly about you finding something you could potentially do as a new career and do well enough regardless of formal history or credentials that you come across confidently when talking for the second thing…
Second (and feel free to do this in parallel as it can take time for this strategy to produce rewards) go meet people. Talk to them about their stuff and try to be genuine and useful member of “society” volunteer for easy enough activities, go participate in time boxed events like this weekend events where you can hone and demonstrate some skill in the presence of others that can provide valuable feedback… generally just work mechanically and methodically at building a face to face social network of people who actually know you … then when a time comes and you’ll know because you’ll have realised you missed a few while learning and getting to know people… just mention you’ve been thinking about doing that for a living, or that you reckon you could totally do that, or sure I could fill in for that if you need someone while recruiting a long term candidate with the right credentials…
Face to face networking is hard but it can and does work.
This is obviously not a solution that fits all career changes, like this won’t work if you want to be a surgeon, or psychiatrist, or anything like that without a possible “amateur practitioner” level. It also won’t work as fast as you may like for some careers as it will for others. It’s going to work well for unregulated professional work like middle management where you need some experience in the topic but not necessarily the need to be an absolute expert in it, or necessarily enough experience to run an entire company... and you may not want a middle management job, in which case you’ll have to work longer at acquiring the skills and having confidence in them in order to gamble on you (which they are doing and what all the HR bullshit is designed to avoid, even as stupid as that seems at times it’s all just de-risking things for the company) and by being a reasonably trustworthy human who is known to a person in a position of power you can bypass that HR stuff.
Also not suggesting this can get you a job you feel you deserve or something like that, I just know that people will absolutely choose to go with a person they know and think genuinely might be able to do the job …over somebody they don’t several weeks to months from now that they will also have reservations about because hiring isn’t perfect and they might accidentally hire a drop kick that can’t do the job.