Despite the way you choose to become a quality assurance specialist, here is the minimum that a QA engineer should know before looking for the first job in IT:
what is quality assurance;
what is testing;
what types of testing are;
what levels of testing are;
what test artifacts are there and why they are used;
what is test design;
what the testing process should look like;
what is test automation and its main types;
what testing metrics are and what they are used for.