I am an ex-Australian Airforce technician commissioned from the ranks as an Engineering Officer. Was forced into handling large amounts of complex data occasionally needing me to write scripts and routines (funny how the services do that). While teaching myself to program using Visual Basic, I was doing a degree in my own time. Part of my degree included some Software engineering units (NOT BY CHOICE). There was a fair amount of pressure having to turn in one assignment a week (same workload as the full time students). Strangely enough I found I was good at it and actually enjoyed it. This was when universities were teaching PASCAL and C. I found the formal education knocked of the rough edges of what I had taught myself. But you must continue to learn and adapt to knew technology. I would rate it as 75% self taught and 25% educated.