The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So I may possibly be looking for a new job soon (this work from home for a company in Atlanta was never intended to be permanent, so they may let me go at any time) and browsing the classifieds has been a little un-nerving. Every job I've had so far has been some type of position where I just happened to have a limited amount of knowledge in a broad range of things that the company was looking for. For example, I got my current job because I'd worked in customer service, done limited web design and had created an online help system before.

Most classifieds I read though look like "Bachelor's Degree required with knowledge of PHP, ASP.NET, C#, PERL, SQL, familiar with Unix shell, experience with Linux Red Hat, Blue Hat, Taupe Hat, Black Hat, CompTIA certified, A+ Certified...or equivalent experience"

Anyway, the deal is, I have no degree. I was working towards an Associates in web application development when someone offered me a job managing and designing web sites and I never looked back. I'm rambling a bit, but here's my question: I've built a few help systems (Adobe RoboHelp), I've built a few websites learning whatever I needed for the task at hand (HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP and VBScript). I've done software support for the last two years for a small software company. At home I'm the same as at work; I'm a computer hobbyist who learns whatever I need to for the task I want to accomplish.

Okay, wow, long post and still no question marks...here it is: what types of jobs should I be focusing on in my search? Also, what things should I try to be learning to make myself more marketable (and quit getting stuck in entry-level jobs) and what resources can you recommend for learning or enhancing those skills? I'm tired of hunting down tutorials online and learning how to make things say "Hello world!" What type of project might I undertake on the side to put skills to use and on display?

Just a suggestion for things you can do today... Who knows?

Register on a few of the online job sites (Monster, WashingtonPost, etc.) to get a better feel for what's out there and what jobs you match. That exercise is valuable for your position, but it sounds like you'll get tons of hits with the kind of descriptions you mention. Then you can tweak your profile and see how things change. That's something you can do now and get results within a week.

Then hone in on local or work-from-home situations with a better tuned approach.

If you have several years of proven experience the degree thing doesn't seem to matter so much, at least in the programming field. Degrees don't necessarily translate to somebody being a good programmer, ditto for certifications, etc.

One area that is "hot" right now is building Web sites using Ruby and Ruby on Rails. At least in the Bay Area, many startups are clamoring for people who know this stuff at all, so the barrier to entry may be lower than if you were trying to get a job writing C/C++ or Java, for example. Another less crowded field is Python programming. It seems like the demand for Python skills is starting to increase, but the pool of people who have those skills is still pretty small.

Something I've been doing recently to learn a bunch of new technologies is cloning an existing site that I like. It's not going to make me a million dollars, but it's been a good as an exercise because I've got all the required functionality laid out for me to implement. You could try picking a site with a not-too-huge feature set and try building a similar site using PHP/Ruby on Rails/Java/Python/etc.

Cool suggestions guys. I did take a look at ROR when I saw a bunch job postings on Craigslist mentioning it a while ago and need to give it a second glance. I like the mimic a website you like idea. Maybe I'll try a SF! clone