Don't know how to tell you but in this current market condition, those certs won't be worth the paper to wipe your @ss with. In case you don't know, those certification training courses cost thousands of dollars and with the todays' economic woes compounded by the biggest hit to the IT industry to date, it isn't likely you'll recoup that expenses any time soon. Lately those certs won't even get you into an interview, without you knowing someone in the inside or get damn lucky to be in the right place at the right time, kind of like hitting a lotto but with lotto it's only a buck. Hell lots of big companies put a freeze on hiring new employees and had implemented some type of weeding process like routing all new hiring through someone higher up who'll need to justify for the newly hired.
People will tell you crap like "MS suck" or "getting MCSE is easy" and tell you how Cisco is the way to go blah blah blah but they'll be talking out of their @ss. See what certs they have and usually they're full of it. Still others will tell you how none of those certs matters and how "real time experience" is the only thing that matters but they're on the same BS trip as well. Kind of hard to know, what you know from the third person / interviewers' stand point without you being able to put them down on papers and even though a person "may" have practical experience they won't put a high school drop out in charge of the whole IT depertment, wether he has experiences up the kazoo or not. As for Cisco, how would you like to compete with those 10K+ (?) that got let go from fricken Cisco themselves for the same job? I'm not trying to talk you out of it but just telling you that you probably won't see the return on the investment anytime soon. Blame it on the economy or the piss poor management of IT fields or you can blame it on the Taliban if that'll help any but the facts remain the same, the timing is off for such venture.
I hold few certs (MCP+I, MCSE, A+, CCNA, etc...), have few years of experience, live in NYC where there's abundance of large corporate environments, etc...and there are some openings for highly skilled personnels but what they're offering aren't paying anywhere nearly attractive as it was just a year or two ago. A friend of mine, who has been in the field over 10 years and experiences up the @ss with certs to match (MCSE, MCSD, CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, Novell, Unix, SQL, programming, etc...) was recently let go. He could get back in the game without too much hassle but admitted that he would take hits in few areas in consessions and at present planning on moving on to other arena. Take it for what you will but if people who are already in the field are feeling the affects than anyone just entering will have a rougher ride until something improve in our enconomy and it doesn't seem like it'll be anytime soon. Hope I'm wrong but I wouldn't put a bet on it. Good luck.