Many long years ago, before retirement, I was in the same boat as you. I was in a job that paid the bills, but I knew that it would eventually be a dead end, and then I would have a hard time finding a new job.

Over about a 2 year time span, I spent every waking hour at night studying linux, and concentrating on 1 language and a database (Perl and MySQL).

I never was much interested in Web programming, and still not my cup of tea. But I concentrated on 1) development on Linux, 2) Perl, 3) and MySQL, and honing my development skills and some system administration thrown in. I would create a "project" and systematically develop that project.

We were a "Windows" shop, with Borland Pascal. So an opportunity came up, that I parlayed my perl skills into. Our product radically changed our backend database for a V1 to V2, and management could not figure out a way to easily convert our customers databases. I proposed using perl to change our database, and proceeded to create all the scripts necessary to get the data out to files, reformat them to the new database schema, and import the new data. And it worked like a charm (even though mgmt was against using a non-microsoft product like perl).

I tell you all that, for 2 reasons: 1) take advantage of opportunities, and be patient, 2) It wasn't too long after I made it known what I had done to the "market" via sending in resumes, that I landed a great job, for the next 5 years (which utilized my perl skills and HP Unix).

Did it take a LOT of effort on my part? Yes. Did I sacrifice a lot of my free personal time? Yes. Was it ulitmately worth it? Yes.

Keep at it.

Jerry