So for me personally doing my own projects is the most important, but to figure out how to do things I will use books, courses (free and paid), people in my network, anything available that can help. As for the official education, the most important aspect for me is the environment of like-minded people and good teachers, some of which I do consider mentors.
I started with something that would be equivalent to community college in the US, which was IT administration focused, so a lot of networking, servers, thing like that. During this time I also started building my homelab in which I learned most of the stuff I know today.
In working on this homelab I started doing some shell scripting and eventually moved into programming. After I finished IT administration degree I started a computer science course at an university of applied science (education is a lot cheaper in the Netherlands than in the US). Which I'm working on finishing now.