Just from my own personal experience, I tend to be wary of companies that put that much emphasis on certs. I tend to think it's their own lack of understanding of anything technical that makes them rely on others (the certifiers) to make sure someone can do the job. Some of the bosses I've had actually think LESS of an individual when they bother to include a certification on their resume/cv that is are very low level cert. One of them actually said, "That one just means he actually has a home computer... BFD."

I've met some real certified idiots in my time. I've met an Enterprise MCSE that couldn't even work a gui ftp client in Windows as well as some truly incompetent Cisco certified folks. They were skilled (gifted, even) at memorizing a bunch of facts long enough to pass a test and then they were done.

I've been lucky. Every place I've worked for the last decade puts little emphasis on certs because they understand that it doesn't matter whether or not you can pass a test, it matters whether you can do the work. They aren't mutually exclusive.

This doesn't mean you won't see "CCNP" as a requirement on a job posting, but it really means that they want someone who can handle that level of work. If you can demonstrate that you can, few places will circular file your resume.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt though. Some of my drive comes from when I worked at Big Health Insurance CompanyX many many years ago and I applied for a decent position that opened up. The first layer of application was to go through an HR rep. This little snot who had no clue what the job was about took one look at me with my lack of cert and damn near thumbed her nose at me. Not long after, someone else scooped me up instead. Someone who told HR to go pound sand and hired me without even making me go through an HR interview. Inside a year I won the President's award (sort of an employee of the month thing) which was pretty cool in a company of 1,500+. The guy who hired me had a doctorate in Information Systems as well as two other masters degrees in other fields. So when they told me I received that award, who do you think was the first person I thought about? She was really rude, but even almost 15 years later it's a silly little vendetta I occasionally snicker about every time I'm hired for something solely on my own merit.