[inefficent1234]

No degree. Best advice you will ever receive: dive head first into your work. Get certified. Meet people and make connections/relationships (at work). Go above and beyond what you are paid to do (if you see something that should be done but no one is necessarily telling you to do it, then do it and do it very well).

Make your manager love you. Make your coworkers love you. Start building a resume listing the major accomplishments you do at work. Stick with the job for a minimum of 2 years.

In your spare time, be learning more (if you have spare time, considering you will be studying for certs, etc.). Just learn a little something on your own everyday. Learn about the web, network programming, various programming paradigms, and maybe a new language or two (at most -- don't go overboard with learning a ton of languages). See if you can apply something you are learning about on your own to your work. If you can't apply what you are learning about to your job, then build something (small) with what you are learning in your spare time. If you can't even begin to use the things you are learning about at all, then stop learning about them and instead, focus on learning things that you can make use of now.

At work: begin to think business-y instead of just technically. Think about: how my skills can accomplish the 1. Business Requirements 2. Project Requirements 3. System Requirements, etc.

If you get good at Python or such, see if you can write a few scripts to automate some of the common tasks your coworkers do. Nothing major, but something that can be useful.

Then after 2 years, put yourself out there with that resume you have been building up and see what kind of bites you get. It's completely possible that 2 years from now the economy is collapsed and the world is broken, but if it's not then following the above will get you a lot farther than taking some classes at a Uni.

[JarJarHulaHoop]

To the OP, this is top-notch advice. In my opinion, the certs are valuable but it's easy to get a bit overwhelmed by it and overdo them (also many of them require experience but I'm sure the company you have a part-time job in can vouch for your experience if you continue with them. I'd advise you to take the more vendor-neutral ones like CompTIA.

As the poster above said, and I cannot emphasize as much, networking is incredibly important so be professional with your work relationships and increase your connections as much as you can.

You may not be able to get pass the degree-wall of big companies like Google (although they are beginning to hire degree-less candidates now) - but that doesn't mean that consolidating your experiences and whacking up a great resume and throwing yourself out there will land you any less of a satisfying job - the clever employers know to look past the worth of pieces of paper acknowledging that you're capable of regurgitating information.

Good luck with what you decide anyhow.