Start simple and iterate.
Whether it's job realted, a hobby, or just something you find interesting.
Robots, graphics, a catalog, word processing, a board game. Your own chat software, personal web site....
I've always believed programming is something you learn by doing, so picj something and have a go. There;s loads of resources out there and you can usually get good help far a good specific question on here.
One of the first real things I did, was an arithmetic trainer for my children. Laying out additions, subtraction, multiplication as though they were doing it on paper. Kept score, remebered their settings, through a signon. Started with a menu and two random numbers and inoput box for the answer. Built it up. A few opf my colleagues borrowed it for their kids, eventually. I learned a lot and hopefully some of them did.
The trick is to pick something you find interesting, that you can start simple and then improve and decorate with more functionality.
Your best chance of breaking into to the field, is to write things that would help you on the job. System monitors, scripts to do a set of tasks, a little expert system.
Then you describe your job as support and development...
In between fixing printers and reseting passwords, I was writing small MIS applications and such.
That was 87, by 92 I was a full time lead developer, never looked back.
