So, in my eyes, competency in programming isn't about knowing everything there is about programming. It's about finding knowledege. There's no shame in looking for similar problems on stack overflow (so long as you don't directly copy if you're in a place which that sort of things matters) and you slowly start to see patterns in your problems, which makes you look a lot smarter than you actually feel.

Unfortunately, you do need to get good at reading doc and code examples. Thankfully you generally get both, but not always.

Having some SysAdmin knowledge goes a long way; terminal command on Windows, Mac and Linux can be a real life saver when all the fancy GUI stuff fails.

The best way to get experience is to actually get involved in coding something medium to large. Its not easy just to jump in, but a lot of open source projects can have some very easy bugs to fix.

To help with recruitment, I add everything I can to github. Even if its bad code it will at least show improvement if you keep going with it (I still cringe at my first attempt at python).

A friend of mine wrote a book about getting hired (helpfully titled "Getting Hired") in the computing industry, it offers some great advice about the employability side of things: http://books.stuartherbert.com/getting-hired/

Hope that helps!