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[nobody]

Looks like it's about that time in my career that I need some form of certification. It'd be a little silly to get an A+ or N+ at this point and I want to move more into infrastructure anyways, I was thinking about the cisco certs. I can't decide on if I want to go for the ccent or the ccna right off the bat. The problem being I've got no experience with the Cisco IOS and I have no time to take any classes that would give me access to a router lab. Any thoughts?

[merlinicorpus]

If you're interested in going into networking the CCNET is the obvious place to start.  If you have experience, you can probably skip right to the CCNA.  I picked up my CCNA a few years ago, and while it was a really intense course, it wasn't hard stuff.  We have one of the top Cisco Academies here where I go to school (it was the very first one in fact) so it seemed like something worth having.  If you can't get access to a router lab, Cisco makes some really good simulator programs.  That said, nothing beats working with the actual gear.

[bliq]

Most of the jobs around here that are looking for Cisco certs, are looking for CCNAs, CISSPs, and CCIEs.  An option available to those of us in the bay area is craigslist often has Cisco gear for sale by people who have just passed their CCNA (or have given up).  Looks like $500 will buy a decent set of gear with which to practice, with the knowledge that you can probably resell it for close to what you paid when you're done.  But that's a perk of living in the thick of San Fran and Silicon Valley where engineers grow on trees.