I got a job once as a producer for a video game publisher and had pretty much no experience. That first couple of months was basically an intense crash course on video editing (Adobe Premiere and After Effects, had never used them before), localization, qa outsourcing, certification, working with external dev teams, figuring out how dev kit machines worked, evaluating pitches and game demos to see if we should pursue publishing them, etc.
Before that I hadn't done much more than develop and self-publish several Flash games, sometimes collaborating with an artist.
They chose me probably because they were tiny, could tell I was passionate about games, and they expected I would do more game design than I ended up doing (my title was Lead Game Designer... I did some of that, but I was mostly a producer).
And since I thought it was mainly a design role, I didn't hardly anything to prepare. Once I got there, it was like someone volunteered me for the Ice Bucket challenge and didn't tell me before dumping the water on me. Had a lot of fun, though.
Only reason why I'm not doing it now was because I felt like my coding skills were atrophying the whole time I worked there and that thought made me feel pretty uncomfortable. I'd probably be more successful now though if I stuck with it, though.