We believe that hands on is the very best way, but it all depends on who you are going to work for. There is no exact science that will let you know which companies look for hands on and which look for cert's, but I can tell you this, smaller companies that are looking to achieve fast results deffinatly want to know if you have done certain things in a production environment. Doing things in the lab is one thing, but when down time and $ are at risk it is a a totally different ball game.

Having a cert is a great for some people, and its great if you can read something in a book and then take a test to prove you know it, or if you run into a problem that you can go lookup how to fix it, but when it comes to the real world, there is not time to go look in the book, companies want you to have seem the problem before or atleast have a good idea how to fix it quickly to avoide loss of reveune.