I'd start by telling everyone, with some degree of detail, where you are and what your background and experience is.

Most people get their start by working for a CI firm and learning how to program on the job and via supplier product training.

My own experience with guys that want to be programmers is that they often just want to do a course or 2 and get hired to program which pretty much never happens.

I've been through this before with results as follows:

Give a young guy a job as an installer so he gets an understanding of how systems work and go together (on the basis of him becoming a programmer) and send him off to do courses on RTI, Crestron programming, Pronto (at the time)and C-Bus and give him ample opportunity during work hours to hone his programming skills up until he reaches a point where he is given his first project of any substance (but not a big or difficult one).

Up until this point he is super confident in his abilities and as soon as he is given this project he wants an office of his own to work in, which he got and started demanding more money befitting a Crestron programmer. He was told that before he gets a big pay rise that maybe he should deliver at least one completed programming project before he gets it. 3 weeks later and it's clear that he is in over his head. Bugs everywhere in the system and he is trying to roll the system back to becoming RTI controlled. Before the first project is completed he left to become a C-Bus programmer for an electrical company, taking his 100K education at our expense with him.

My point is that if you have no experience, you need to start with the basics and put time in there to learn the craft. You will never be a great programmer worth hiring if all you can focus on is getting to the full time programming bit. It's one thing to learn the software, it's another to create a nice UI that people like to use and is simple. Likewise you need to know how to trouble shoot why some things are not working and how to correct those things.

This ended up way longer than i intended.