Sounds like that dude cheated on his tests. Anyone who starts replacing hardware before making sure he can't ping that workstation is a fraud. I've seen it more times than you might think. Working independantly for several years, it amazed me at the people who considered themselves "system administrators", and worse yet, their employers did too. Some of these people shouldn't have been turned loose on a home PC, yet they were somehow in charge of whole networks. Scary. I got lots of stories about incompetents in this field!
I am an MCSE, and though I'm not using it 100% on my job, I found the training valuable.
I went through a local ATEC for coursework, read a lot of books, and just started playing with equipment to get hands-on experience.
I've seen some truly worthless MCSEs out there--they always went to a boot camp.