My background is not dissimilar to Paul's - except I had no one to explain extended partitions to me, I had to discover for myself.
When running my own business there were never any degrees in 'Non native restoration of tapes' so I chose people with suitable programming skills who I thought would develop and fit in.
I would still consider character is more important than an exact degree/experience match. However, large companies and 'Civil service' put a lot of emphasis on training and paper qualifications.
For forensics I think it is very important to be able to understand data structures, and not be phased by Hex dumps. After that, it is using the most appropriate tool to get the next stage of your answer. If you cannot understand your raw data, you will be lost.
Do as Paul did and write some tools to analyse something, hit some brick walls and find a way around them. Start thinking in Hex (ignore decimal) and dive into unknown data and make sense of it (with the aid of some of the books already mentioned).
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