For someone who's only had a handful of jobs in a quarter century in the industry, I've been on the other side of the interview table quite a lot. In my last position I did a lot of hiring. In fact, there was a chunk of time near the end when turnover was high, and I spent most of my time interviewing candidates . A couple of those interactions generated the only bit of useful advice I've been able to pass along to younger folks just getting out of school. After a relatively productive phone interview, a candidate asked that magic question completely unprompted: "What skills do I need to be useful to you guys?"
That's it: recognize the gaps in your skill set and don't be shy about consulting decision-makers on which areas to focus on to become most relevant to them.
When asked, my answer has always been more or less the same: make stuff. Make things for other people who can offer feedback, like it or hate it, people who can turn to you after 2 weeks of sweat and say, "this doesn't match our brand." This simulates the client service experience, and it also pushes you out of your zone of comfort. If you make something for yourself, you're likely to build it out of what you already know. When you make something based on specs you didn't dictate, you end up learning some nuance, some nook or cranny of your chosen craft, that you never knew existed.
To folks preparing to enter the world fo web development, I'd add one item to that advice: make sure you learn PHP, and learn it well.
I'm a little surprised when I talk to recent graduates who never learned the finer points of PHP, a language on which 80% of the Internet currently runs. WordPress, the engine that drives a third of the visible web, runs on it. And with PHP 7.x revitalizing the community at the moment, the notion of sending graduates out into the world without a detailed knowledge of PHP seems like a disservice.
Ignoring PHP in academia may have made sense at some point 10 years ago when adoption for responsive design was low and native mobile apps looked like the future. Now that the future is here and PHP is going strong and the market for native app development has softened considerably, that choice seems dangerously misguided.
Your school should have required high-level PHP, or at least taught it (the top code academy in Indianapolis does not offer PHP), but that can't be helped now. To prepare yourself for the real world of web development, make stuff in PHP. Create WordPress plugins. Build a Laravel app for the heck of it on a weekend. Make your own slap-dash CMS out of sticks and glue. Break it. Fix it. Rebuild it from the ground up. Get in over your head and troubleshoot your way to safety. It's the best way, and often the only way, to learn and thereby make yourself useful to a real world employer.