Taking a 'risk'. I was working in an infra/support role at a state government run education institute, and following a reasonably interesting (compared to most

Taking a 'risk'. I was working in an infra/support role at a state government run education institute, and following a reasonably interesting (compared to most of the work) project I started looking for work I would enjoy more (than the regular stuff) elsewhere. I got a call from an interstate contracting agency (and I still don't know how this part happened) about a job I couldn't do (flash dev) and didn't apply for. I explained that I hadn't applied and wasn't interested but then they mentioned they were also looking to fill a federal government contract for a front-end developer. I had been applying for web jobs (despite having zero commercial experience in it, it'd been what I originally intended to do when I started studying years earlier) so I said I was interested, and within 10 days (I think? It was a while ago) I had confirmation I'd won the contract, over someone with 10 years experience. I've long since moved back towards ops/infra (albeit in a web focus - load balancers and DB clusters rather than desktop management policies and file/print servers) and dev-tooling type stuff, but that first big step - away from family, and a reasonably safe government job, to a fixed-term contract definitely played a big part in getting me where I am now.