I have two degrees, one in CIT, and one in MIS, which have proven more than worthless to me.
I have a Net+ and feel it is worthless.
I have a MCSE from 2003, it's worthless to me.
I never upgraded my MCSE to MCITP because I felt it was worthless.
I have a CCNA and now feel it's worthless.
I was going to go for CCNP, but felt it's worthless because my end goal is CCIE.
I passed my CCIE written, also worthless, but when I pass the CCIE lab it will be my first cert that I don't feel is worthless. The CCIE lab doesn't have multiple choice questions that you can just memorize from a brain dump site, and nobody questions whether you are a "paper CCIE" because it just isn't possible. It gets universal respect because you pretty much have to have real world experience to pass it.
I have 13 years of IT experience involving everything from PCs, Windows/Linux/Unix servers, virtualization, networking, VOIP, writing code, etc., and it is worth more than all of the peices of paper combined. When I first got into IT, I was all about getting pieces of paper, thinking it would somehow magically advance my career. However, as I met more and more people in my industry, I came across "paper MCSEs", "paper CCNA's", and "paper<insert cert here>" who could study for a test and pass it, but had no real world experience to back it up. I also had classmates that thought they would land $80k/yr jobs after getting their bachelor's degree, with no experience. In my first consulting company I worked for, I worked with a guy who was MCSE who hadn't actually worked on a production server, and he couldn't even figure out how to reset a user's password in active directory! He just was good at memorizing books, or more likely brain dumps. I have learned that quite frequently, the way that exams want you to answer questions are NOT how things get done in real life, Ex: in real life you use third party tools which save tons of time and increase accuracy. There is no substitute for real world experience, especially resolving outages that cause thousands of users to be unable to work, which as you can imagine is SUPER stressful. In interviews I have often been asked to explain the biggest outages I have ever resolved, and how I resolved them. As far as why I am against degrees, I found that all they show is that you can attend a college for four years, and upon completion employers are hesitant to hire you because they think you want too much money. I actually had a former boss tell me that he didn't want to hire me because of my degrees, but my varied experience won him over. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed getting the pieces of paper, but in hindsight don't feel they were worth the effort.
I would HIGHLY recommend that you work at a consulting company, not a corporate IT department if your goal is increasing your knowledge and building up a resume. Take minimum wage if you have to, because you will rapidly increase your worth and put all kinds of useful stuff on your resume, which translates to much more money later. You get to work in tons of different environments instead of just one company, and often they will pay for your certs and insist that you get them to maintain their partnership levels with companies like Cisco and Microsoft. It's also pretty common in large corporate environments to be pigeonholed into doing one boring job that doesn't advance your knowledge(DNS admin, active directory user admin, etc.). Don't even get me started on "change control" and other corporate bureaucratic practices that amount to filling out 20 pages of paperwork to do necessary tasks, and those 20 pages have to pass through three different departments within IT for signatures. I've been trapped in corporate IT jobs before just to get a paycheck at an easy job, but consulting companies improve your knowledge WAY more.
Get the experience first, then get the pieces of paper if not having them holds you back because you need a certain cert to qualify for a promotion. Also use GNS3 to learn about Cisco if you don't have real equipment to practice on, and use VMWare/Xen/Proxmox to setup virtual servers to practice the Windows server stuff.
Be prepared not to have a life if you really want to have maximum upward mobility in this industry, and to get calls at 3AM if something major breaks. Good luck.
