On the counter of Ted's support. My organization works with a lot of clients and many of them decided they want to have their own GIS person on location. The big mistake they make is assigning people to the job who have been with their organization for while and think of GIS as a slough job to give them until they retire or they hand it off to someone that barely knows how to turn on a computer.
The most successful of these "promotions" was however the client who handed it off to an IT Database Manager person. She got it from one of the people who they gave it to until retirement.
I am not saying you have to have a GIS education to be good at GIS but is good to go through at least the basic training that ESRI offers to help get you up to speed. Believe, me I must charge and average of 200 hours of tech support every year showing people how to do the most basic of GIS functions, things a grad from Tech College in GIS would know.
Now Chris and Ted you do seem a better fit than most i have had to work with.
The best qualifications for going into GIS are the ability to be out of the box and to be able to figure things out. As Ted has shown he can.
To me GIS is for the ambitious who WANT to know more and more about the discipline.
I have a 4 year degree in Geography with a GIS Minor. To be honest the Geography Degree is a lot more valuable to my career than the GIS Minor. I learned more about GIS in my first 6 months on the job than I did in 2 years in the minor.
The Geography element was a lot more valuable as it taught me map fundamentals, about land and relationships and how the environment works and why things are where they are.
A programming education or experience will be a lot more valuable than a GIS certificate
There is a LOT more to ArcGIS than you can ever learn in the classroom.