QA here.
Yes, manual won’t take you far.
Learn a language and a tool for each domain like PlayWright/Cypress/Selenium from UI automation, RestAssured/Postman/Karate for API and learn about test planning, jira for test management.
And later on keep learning about CI tools like Jenkins/Azure/AWS.
Make yourself visible in common group instead of dev DM.
Communicate to PM/Design/Dev team for feature testing. Get yourself involved in PRD stage rather when dev give you build. Make team life easy by identifying friction/bottleneck in team and implement a process and reiterates.
P.S.- Don’t start with codeless automation tool to start with.
3.5 LPA to 67 LPA as QA in 7 years as Automation QA.
All the best.