Coug, congratulations on doing continued study! The way I'm seeing things in the near future, solid understanding of networking will be a hard requirement, as the industry is moving away from centralised architectures to heavily de-centralised architectures especially with the growth in the utilisation of "cloud" services and telecommute/remote workers. (Hybrid setups being the most common, some services are still in-house, but others are outsourced, and you need the knowledge on how to tie these togther).
Like some of the others here, I've done my share of certifications and also let them lapse (MCP, Sun, etc), mainly because obtaining them opened doors, but once you had the door opened and had experience, most employers cared little that you actually continued to hold the certification via re-certifcation in the cases were they lapse. (unless they were a gold-partner/reseller and current certifcation of employees was required to maintain partner/reseller status).
Regarding ITIL, in this neck of the woods, ITIL is only really done by some government departments (at least that's the only place I'm seeing ITIL certification as a requirement in job adverts). But now working on the software development side of things were everything is "Agile", ITIL is loathed by many developers, mainly due to the philosophically differences between ITIL and Agile. (ITIL is very rigid in planning,requirements and development,deployment with set stages and little allowance for change, where as Agile assumes it will all change in the future and the project workflow reflects that). I did my ITIL certification when I did my Uni degree (it was one of the courses I elected to do as part of my degree program), and while interesting to learn how some organisations like to do things, unless there is a requirement for the actual ITIL certifications, a really good Project Management course will offer more value over the course of ones career. (At least with a PM course, you'll learn how/why some of the project managers are doing things they are, and be able to work with them more effeciently because you understand their mind set). Also, the local job adverts are starting to specify PM training/experience even in infrastructure/architecture roles, as it's starting to be expected that the person who designed the architecture should be able to manage the project implementing it...
