My highest education qualification is a Certicate in Electronics & Communications and it hasn't helped me much in my employment at all.

All my programming skills have been learnt at the Moriarty School of Computing Studies and he doesn't hand out diplomas, mainly because they would be useless as nobody would accept them :-). It has meant that I have learnt whatever I needed to know to get the job done, at my own pace.

Not having a diploma doesn't seem to have done me any harm to date (I have been working as a programmer for almost 11 years), but that may change next year as I plan on looking for a new job