Yeah I want to get a body of work together - guess it would be fairly rudimental stuff at this stage. I'm fairly crap at design and drawing - I've never really given photoshop a real bash, I have it installed.
I'm currently a mortgage underwriter - the only obvious transferrable skill I can think of is attention to detail.
My thoughts based on some research is to get to grips with HTML/CSS and then Javascript - do you think this is wise? I've read its more beneficial to become proficient in a few areas rather than jack of all trades.
Cheers for your advice.
Body of work is always a good idea, and it's very true that many front end devs come from design backgrounds. It's not essential to the job or anything, you can learn about a lot of the concepts but 99% of the time the designer will work alongside you and pick up on every misplaced pixel and drive you to distraction.
Agree with Paul on the course, for £8k I'd want it pumped into my brain like the matrix. If you're interested in Ruby, a zillion resources online and there's a really good rails tutorial -
https://www.railstutorial.org/book/beginningGit - can learn it all online -
https://git-scm.com/Masses of learning resources for javascript as well.
CSS isn't hard, but it's one of those things that some people can do really, really well and everyone else is pure average at. CSS is my specialism so I may come across twatty, but most people are shite at it, trust me.
First off - I would concentrate on writing excellent markup, learning what the browser does with that markup without any CSS. Make sure it reads well and as expected and then move onto the CSS. Semantics and good structure always pay off.
Honestly, you might feel you need structure and someone to push you along and the amount of stuff to learn is intimidating, but everywhere I've worked and people we've interviewed the ones who are self starters and continuously learn are the better devs.