I work for HP. I'm a helpdesk operator - like I didn't already hate Windows enough lol.
Which desk are you at? There's a few people here, myself included, who have served time at HP and / or EDS.
I served on the ill-fated Dearborn, MI HP network team (mostly for Ford) and then for an even more ill-fated US government project before bailing from HP a couple days before I'd have been laid off at the end of that debacle.
Nowadays I'm a general IT guy for a privately owned manufacturing company. It's a huge wide array of stuff I do. I might be fighting with the AD or Exchange in the morning, replacing a motherboard in a giant stamping press in the afternoon, and then tweaking some firewall rules in the evening.
First of all, certification is of little use, unless if you work for specific fields (PCI QSA) and/or for customer that require it (government could require certs). Not only are the certification systems just cash machines for the companies running them, but the actual tests are a joke as well. Of course if you intend to compete for customers who require or prefer certified consultants that's something you will have to do.
Yeah... The only real reason to get a cert is because your customer needs to mark that you have one in their checkbox sheet. I can verify that at least most areas of US Gov do require certs. (They have a 'pick one from this column, one from this column' -type menu of requirements, depending on your role.)
As to actual training, well I have little to contribute here, as I myself had no official training in the field whatsoever. In fact, this is more of a norm than rule for anyone I know in the field. Most of them are self-taught hackers, and only very few have even completed their academic degrees (this isn't that unusual these days in general though).
Most of the best technicians I've met are people who just worked into the job, much like this process. (Though to later in your post, even for academic purposes, I wouldn't recommend aggressively scanning any networks you don't have permission to.)
