I got lucky twice.
Almost 30 years ago, I was working as a "paste-up artist" at the Pennysaver in Southern California. We got a couple of Apple computers in to play with to see if they could make ads. We had some clip art and Illustrator 1.1 which fit on a floppy drive. We could only draw lines, no grayscale and no color. From there I worked at print shops and advertising agencies and my skills progress as did Apple computers..
Then I moved and got to work at Florida State University - Supercomputer Computational Research Institute. There I got on the Internet and learned TEX. This was at the very beginning of the World Wide Web. Again, as the WWW progressed, so did my skills. I learned HTML and Web Design.
After teaching Photoshop, Illustrator, Web Design, and HTML at a community college and for-profit art school, I decided to get my Masters of Education in Instructional Design. This combined all of my skills into one. I even got to design my own class for a for-profit school and Masters of Education program and teach in Second Life.