if you want an IT job and are interested in money/career then go onto jobserve (*other sites available - esp itjobswatch I think it is) and establish the career options/salary rates for skills you partly have and can extend in your current role and then take it from there (ie it's easier to get your foot in the new door if you have something they want, and if you pick a desirable/wanted/growth area skill there tend to be more doors)

Lnaguage wise I suspect C# will the a flier (extensivley used, lots of jobs but won't carry and real salary premium) but that's IMHO, I'd also improve your SQL as ultimately mosts systems use data and therefore having a sound grasp of RDBMS tends to be useful.

As a sweeping generalisation I'd say it will be easier to do something you want to do for 40 hours a week and the next X years, so I'd have a think about what you want out of life etc.

Given your background and role I am surprised you are not using SAS. That seems to be where it is at in terms of Customer Insights and CRM stuff. Having solid SQL will be a good skill to have alongside SAS.

Programming with the view to developing actual systems would be very different to what you are doing now. Do you enjoy the technical side and wish to continue in that, if not then have you read up anything about Business Analysis?

I see what you mean about SAS and the number of jobs, will do a bit of digging about that one. The coding thing is i know how useful VBA can be, i also know my code can be a bit messy, I have learnt by hacking macros. I am interested in learning what else i can do with code to make my life easier, automation of tasks, that sort of thing, not really interested in learning how to write games, apps.

As for doing what makes you happy, i do enjoy my job, but a bit more money would be nice, and more importantly i want to make sure i have a decent skill base.

Given your business intelligence background I'd be looking at big data - Hadoop and the like. If you really feel like programming I'd probably be looking at scripting, not full-on compile/deploy Java/C++/C# style, mainly because grep, regular expressions and the like are so handy when it comes to working with data. I don't think you should start over as a programmer, but rather try to leverage the skills and knowledge you've already got.

I've just signed up for a course on [url= https://www.coursera.org/nlp/class/index ]natural language processing[/url], it's free and based on one of Stanford University's courses, would be a good way to pick up a bit of Python, as well as being an interesting and potentially lucrative way of looking at and treating data. I think there's still time to sign up, it starts tomorrow.

Edit: rationale for Hadoop - big data seems to be an area that's developing fast, and there aren't that many experts in it yet - unlike Java (for example), you're not going to be competing against 1000s of people with years of experience. (That said, "developing fast" may be a nice way of saying "overhyped", only time will tell...)

thanks for that Mogrim, have signed up for a course will see how i go, and yes it does sound interesting.

If you run into trouble doing the programming assignments my email's in my profile!