Unless your job requirement (so usually US government work) requires it then I would say most entry level certs for any vendor are not worth the paper they are printed on, and that goes double for the A+/compTIA stuff which I could almost see working against you if you are going to try your hand in private industry (I will have to conduct a test of that one of these days). After that though a degree might still be preferable the value of certs increases significantly. There are some absolutely insane certs out there, the virtualisation world having one that the test for I would put on par with a phd, for which holders are in great desire by loads of people but I am drawn to wonder if that is not more the person than the cert.
Penetration testing... never seen an undergrad course worth it though I will not rule out the possibility of one being good, postgrad maybe if it is a good one and you know are going to be applying for people that know what goes (the average hiring wonk will have heard of a MCSE, pen testing is more likely to be assumed to be testing literal pens) and certs are right out.
Cisco stuff, and I guess Juniper as well, can do well but there is the old adage of "everybody has microsoft". To that end maybe consider floating around the local job websites and seeing numbers. I would value a good red hat, suse or similar cert more than cisco in terms of knowing the person I am speaking to knows their stuff but you do have the "how many are needed" issue again, on unix and Linux then in most cases if it is not directly related to something on
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major or something from the Oracle/Sun and maybe HP world it is probably not worth the time and even a few of those have some of dubious value (linux mint does not have anything that I can see but even if they did I would be dubious, and I love mint and use it on loads of client systems).
Apple. hahahahahahahaha. I guess you could do OK in the more creative industries, in a little shop or at an American university.
database/db admin stuff... Oracle and mysql have some good stuff, microsoft not doing badly either. You might be surprisingly employable with such things but I hope you have something else you can do if that dries up as it will probably not leave you with many general computer/network skills.
On a related note you rock up with skills in
https://puppetlabs.com/ https://www.vagrantup.com/ http://www.webmin.com/ and definitely know you way around
http://www.spiceworks.com/ and you will probably not have too much trouble.
"Cellphone Tech"... I guess maybe phone repair could do something, and if they had good ones for deploying them in enterprise or something then it would be valuable. As it stands if you know how security works then most of this should be common sense, not to mention I can not see any sensible sysadmin allowing someone with a shiny phone certificate to play on a big boy network.
More general telecoms can still do things but if "what is voip and sip" is a question you are left asking after such a couse then I hope you have access to a time machine as there is little else that you might be useful for.
Back to the question at hand I am a couple of years out of knowing what each and every one meant and they have rejigged it once more -- though I am not likely to respond that MCSE is Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer it could still happen if you catch me early in the morning (others with older knowledge reading it is now Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert, and is more aimed at the old MCITP market though it is more or less equivalent and not an insult to those that previously have a MCSE). The MCSA stuff is better from where I sit than the A+ but I would not hope to do much with it, as a springboard/I am continuing on then and here is how I prove it then absolutely.
Still 7 and server 2008 are more or less the standard, however we are now in extended support and that runs out on 14/01/2020 in both cases.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb...=0&esdate=0&medate=0&spdate=0&Filter=FilterNO
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
It is basically 2016 now and if you are going to spend a year getting these certs that is going to be 2017 or about 3 years of work time if you do train up on 2008 server. That is enough time for training up to 2012 if you do self study I suppose. I would start in the very near future though as next summer will probably be a bit too late I reckon.
Those "boot camps" I am quite distrustful of. Many will do what is advertised and will do well if you already know a fair bit about computers but they way they are sold, especially to those that might not know computing,... urgh.
" I want to be capable of doing migration from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro and same with Windows 2008/2012/R2 Server to Windows 2016 Server."
Normally I would say virtualise and do it, however that is not quite what you asked. If you can though do set up everything in a nice VM and do it..
Anyway I have to go and was dangerously close to waffling so I will leave it there for now.
