JPSem

I never know what people mean when they ask about “breaking into” a field such as finance or whatever else it may be.  Does it mean
getting your first job in a particular field?
feeling like you’ve proven yourself in that field?
making a good salary working in that field?
I think it’s like anything else.  It takes lots of hard work, patience, and experience to build a career and market yourself competitively as part of the labor force.  Now there’s nothing wrong with experience in IT, but anybody can read 2 hours a day of financial news a day—it’s incredibly superficial what passes for news these days.  You have to look past the popular press if you’re serious about this.  And there are lots of finance and investing books out there of the popular press’ “self-help” genre that aren’t worth much either.  You can learn a lot in 2 hours of reading per day, but you really need some serious and worthwhile reading material in order to decide if this is something you want to get into.
As far as finance being a shrinking field, well it looks like a lot of fields are, or simply have shrunk and are not expanding as yet: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU02300000