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.
There are worlds of diffrence in the kinds of training and coursework you can get. Mine was from a $299 CD kit, and the 6 tests were $100 each. I have $900 in certification. Playing with the equipment is the most direct route to knowledge in this field. No book or test is going to even come close to giving you the kind of knowledge you will learn from actually doing it. As for your training, you probably had better training than me, but in the end, we are both MCSE's with no distinction between us. That demonstrates how easily someone can get this certification without actually knowing what he is doing, or worse yet, by cheating, which happens more often than you would think.