No experience, no position at our company
Although certs are good to show that your organization has a fancy IT department to those who do not understand, when it comes to actual use for a person in our company (we are I.T. consultants), there is absolutely no substitute for experience. Same goes for other companies that ask us to staff their I.T. departments: we never go for candidates with no or little experience, no matter what certifications or even I.T.-related degrees they have.
You want to get into I.T.? Take some basic courses, and start at the bottom. Work for a call center support place, even. Then work your way up from there. There just is no substitute for real experience in the real world, and anyone who knows anything related to this will agree. HR people who know nothing may let you through to get an interview (because many of them know squat about I.T.), but once you get through to a person who knows, you will be filtered out after your interview. Then again, you may get lucky and go from an HR person who doesn't know to a manager who has no clue either...how you will manage to actually do your job, though, is a different story, as textbooks and classes will not cover even 5% of the day-to-day issues (let alone more advanced issues) that come up in companies.
