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@bq
My first permanent job was a delphi developer/support person. I lied and said I'd done 9 months when I'd actually only read the first 3 chapters of "Teach yourself Delphi in 21 days" but I'd done Pascal at college for the BTEC, so I was in a good blagging position. As it turned out the job was all support, and I did their website as an extension of writing their HTML help files. This gave me the experience to do a few start-up sites - none of which came to anything, but looked ok as a portfolio. After a year and a month I left, and got employed by a university as a Delphi programmer/web developer, for a considerable pay rise, just before the dot com bubble burst.
Some of it was luck - I was hired as a Delphi programmer who did a bit of web stuff, but they moved away from Delphi so I became all web. But basically I spent as much time as I could studying and learning all the latest web techniques whenever I wasn't doing the employer's stuff. I moonlighted by doing freelance work to keep my hand in, (and my finances solvent), and grabbed any project, the more challenging the better, to practice what I had learned and prove I was the best web developer in the company. I led the development on that company's new website, made the right decisions about standards and did a really future-proof site, and as their very prestigious and expensive design agency admitted when I went for a job interview with them a couple of years ago, I taught them everything they knew about web standards. I stayed there for 3 more years, doing less and less of their work and more and more of my own and decided to leave before my career stagnated.
At first I was going for senior developer jobs, but it was too little money and responsibility, and I was used to running the front end show, so when an agent said I should try for my current job, I read the spec, realised I was perfect for it, put on a 3 piece Saville Row suit and managed to convince them of that fact, so they employed me. The suit was important.