In terms of qualifications, our son completed a Batchelor of Software Engineering at Media Design School in Auckland. After qualifying, the group he completed his final submission with, developed a game amongst themselves that was good enough that the group had it produced by some outfit in the USA and I believe it's still available on Steam (although when they got poached a number of months later they had to cease development/updates). The group that were poached consisted of two developers and two designers, and they were paid to move to the UK to work for an American company five and a half years ago. To cut a longer story short, he's currently working in Brighton, England, for IO Interactive and earning good coin and certainly more than he'd be earning in NZ.

I don't know what the trick is, but working with others who are also looking for work, to produce something playable and getting it up on the likes of Steam seems to have had a lot to do with it.