Hi Bas
A few words of advice, most is common sense and will have probably already occurred to you:
Do not burn your bridges with your current IT career, you may have the opportunity to make a few quid doing some ad-hoc work while you are training and after training you might be grateful of the income while you are looking for a flying job.
The secret to finding that elusive first flying job is networking, I note that you are currently working on a contract for a ME airline, do your best to get to know some of the pilots, maybe sorting out some IT tech issues for them and stay in touch with them while you are training. The airline that you work for might not take on freshly qualified people but the pilots might hear of opportunities elsewhere for newly qualified pilots.
If you have friends or family who fly commercially, make sure that you stay close to them.
When you’re training try to enhance your network amongst other trainees and instructors within the school, any one of them might go on to fly commercially and could help you get into your first job. All these contacts will be invaluable to you.
Try to do the CPL and MEIR at the same school, some airlines like to see continuity in training at least during CPL and MEIR (not so much for PPL and hours building).
If you can, do the hours building within the area that you intend doing your CPL training to get used to the area and the visual landmarks around. I did my CPL with a chap who did all his hours building in Florida using an expensive GPS, his aircraft handling was great but his visual navigation was rubbish because he did not know the area well and he was not used to navigating without a GPS.
Do not believe any of the flying school marketing BS, they just want to separate you from your cash. I attended a very good modular school, they boast that all of their CPL/ MEIR students are now employed as pilots, which is rubbish as myself and the bloke that I was paired up with for CPL and another bloke that I was paired up with for MEIR are not working as commercial pilots.
Good luck with your PPL and taking it further if that is what you decide to do.