As a person that has looked for work with AND without certs, certs help. The only way to get a job without certs is to already have 10-20 years experiance working with other companies (or one company) and maybe know someone in the company. Other than that first get the "easy" certs (A+, Net +, Microsoft) then work on the harder ones (CCNA and Microsoft servers). I am still working on getting the Microsoft server certs. CCNA is a beast if you have never done networking before.