Looking for advice to Access to the IT support profession

Practical experience is crucial!  The only value of a certification is the practical experience that supports it.  It's important to build a foundation of knowledge in each key area.  Your IT knowledge is only going to be as good as what you have experienced.  I am built home labs when doing my certifications back in the day (A+, MCSE, CCNP, etc...).  FYI... MCSE has been replaced by MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional).  

Alot of people waste money going to career colleges, especially when they loose most of their knowledge once they got their certification(s).  Primarily, becuase they don't have any experience to back up the knowledge and so the majority of the information doesn't stay.   Fortunately for me, I began my certifications while working in the industry, but what was most important and more valueable is I built physical home labs for each certification.  This required purchasing hardware based on what was needed for the certifications.  Now a days, with virtualization you can build a pretty elaborate MCITP environment on a single server with multiple virtual machines.  However, you will need a pretty robust server with a good amount of memory.  For Cisco, there are alot of simulators that can get you familiar in working in Cisco routers and switches.  Although, going after CCDP (Certified Cisco Designed Professional) would be a great assest in your foundation.  This will teach you how to better understand and architect complex Network topologies.

FYI...  You will spend less money on building your own labs and purchasing certification coarseware vs. spending money at career schools that only care about you signing on the dotted line at rediculous costs.  I don't how it is in the UK, but in the US the schools take advantage of people.

As mentioned previously, there are other valuble certifications and biggest one now is arround virtualization such as VMware.  Everyone is virtualizing these days this the direction almost all companies are going to.  More importantly, this leading to more organization going to the cloud, which means less IT jobs.  

So be for warned, in years to come more and more companies will have their entire company in Cloud service providers infrastructure (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, etc...).  As an IT Manager, IT currently dealing with this as we speak.  This impacts all of the higher level engineering and helpdesk jobs.  This is what businesses refer to as the Consumerization of IT.

Personally, knowing what I know now I would probably consider a different career direction.  The most valuble degrees is engineering, science, business, etc...    


Good Luck!