Look at job applications and see what companies are looking for.

You can teach yourself LINUX (including stuff like apache, mysql, etc.) and programming. With services like AWS and Digital Ocean you can essentially set up and run the whole stack, develop an app and run it there.

I'm doing IT for a bank, with a degree in computer science. Theoretically, most of the IT skills can be obtained by self learning, books or online, doesn't matter. But you need to figure out which skills you want to learn and how these skills can help you career wise. For instance, SQL is fairly easy to start and every IT job including QA, Support requires that. Interacting with databases requires some programming capacity. Python isn't my personal favorite but it can be a great start. Everyone can put MS office skills on their resume, but few people are proficient in Excel. There are many things can be done with Excel, indeed. There are plenty of self taught IT professionals, but everyone I work with has a degree nowadays. The competition is tough. Honestly I don't think I could learn to program without outside help(school, mentor, etc).

Google skills would be a 1st option. Then, you can find what IT skills interest YOU and go from there. The competition is tough, you don't just casually stroll into IT.

AWS and other services are fairly cheap to use if being used as a learning tool. Then there are user groups for Linux too, where you network with others who have similar interests. There you can find mentors to help guide you along the way and even help you find a job. So there are no excuses why someone can't learn software cheaply and on their own. Even if someone couldn't afford a computer, an old one given away like from free-cycle could be used to run Linux to learn on it. And take it to the public library to use WiFi. I know a young guy who did this. He got two old computers and set them up to be Linux servers in his home and spent months learning about them. How to install, configure, etc., and then was able to get a part-time job being a Linux admin which turned into a full-time job. He worked there for several years before he then attended college to get an IT degree.

You can learn programming, hacking and IT (networking, security, hardware, software) all on the internet. But more advanced topics like computer science, hands on hardware, and engineering aspects of IT should better be learned in person.

I would suggest learning SQL. Here the emphasis lately is on big data, and business intelligence. Most of us involved in that work are not from IT but from the business side, and have had to depend on IT for the interfaces to extract data, unless able to learn some basic SQL, such as joining tables from the various relational database systems. Our GIS system is one of those that needs data from other systems.