I know, some people think professional certifications are lame. The plain and simple truth is that if you want to be a security professional (or any type of IT professional) these days, you have to have certifications. One reason is, all your competition has certifications and it shows employers that the candidate that has certs has enough conviction to actually study for, spend the money on, and pass the tests. Other than that, PCI standards are very important to industry today and PCI requires that IT staff be certified. That being said, I found a great guide to CompTIA's Security+ certification, which has recently been recognized by the US Department of Defense (Directive 8570.1) so it does have some clout. Besides, no matter how leet you may be, you might actually learn something in the course of studying for the exam.

Given, this is the entry level security test, it really does give you a solid understanding of the ideas and principles behind the standard procedure for keeping systems as secure as they can be. While there is alot more to study to really be ready to do work like penetration testing or vulnerability assessments professionally, its a good gateway to more serious certifications like CISSP or ECCouncil's curriculum.

While you're at the Techtopia website checking out the Security+ guide, you might as well check out some of the other stuff they have. They have good guides on Ubuntu, openSuse, Ruby, MySQL, C#, PHP and a few other things.