A few weeks ago you wrote a bit about breaking into networking and IT security with Cisco certs. Two comments on that:I knew a lot of Cisco SEs, and all of them were smart dudes. So you know about Eseell.
1) Last week I accepted a job offer from Cisco to become a pre-sales systems engineer for service providers and data centers in the Southwest US. At least a small part was due to your voice being one of dozens of current and former Cisco employees I've spoken to about working there, none of whom said that it wasn't a good company to work for.2) Several managers I interviewed with were quite vocal about the fact that my CCIEs and CCDE were more valuable credentials to them than any college degree could be, so you were definitely spot on about that.
Second, look at his point number 2, confirming what I've been saying - you don't need to study this at a University. The certifications that people care about don't come on a sheepskin. There's a huge demand for these skill sets, and you can learn this yourself for very little money. There are even some really good free education sites on the 'net.
For someone who's smart and motivated and not going the usual college route, making database-backed websites or doing open-source software is another possible way to demonstrate enough competence to be worth being paid. The networking stuff that you suggest has the advantage of sharply standardized training programs and standard certifications which are close enough to real work skills that you can just march through them to demonstrate competence without work experience. However, the website and software stuff has its own advantage, that you can make a competence-demonstrating portfolio of your own projects using trivially cheap equipment and free software. E.g., it's not not expensive or insanely difficult to make a slick database-backed website based on the LAMP stack, or to develop a moderately-popular utility supporting a popular platform, something like one of the plugins used by a program like Blender to import and export model data from the many external formats out there.
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