I can help answer this one. Networking is not a poorly paid job depending on what sector you go into. If you go the route of working whilst gaining qualifications in vendor specific technology you will progress quickly. We used to have contractors come onboard the submarine that were specialists in sun Solaris or Cisco routing etc and they used to be paid very healthy sums of money. The place to look to get an idea of wages within the industry is cwjobs. If you put the term networking into the Searxh you will find that a lot of positions demand 300 pounds plus per day. If you get into the networking security side of things then you will be earning more. Especially in the banking sector and as a penetration tester. You should be looking at the CISSP or CCNA security for things like this. Working in IT is a constantly changing field though and you would need to carry on studying indefinitely. Another option to get into this field........join the forces!!