Hot & Useful software skills for novice converts?
pvg: One decent way is to learn the software technologies and tools used in their particular domains. There's usually some set of fairly standard tools and plenty of self-taught experts to provide guidance. 
The other path is the more general - 'learning to program a computer' which these days really means web programming.When the typical interaction with a personal computer was picking menu items from a screenful of text, you learned BASIC and that, while limited, gave you some idea of what programming was about.Now the typical interaction is with a web page so arguably learning to program is learning to write web apps. The BASIC equivalent there is perhaps a page-embedded language like PHP. It's simple, direct, is an actual marketable skill and would introduce a beginner to a lot of the necessary details without much digression into more convoluted concepts (OO or functional programming, 'frameworks', etc, etc). Armed with the foundations, one can then branch out to things sexier/higher paying/useless - say, Ruby/Java/Arc.