If you can swing it, I would go get an MSDN subscription. It's the best $250 you could ever spend. It gives you access to every product MS makes for "testing and development" purposes. With this subscription you can play with all the major players like Exchange Server, Terminal Server, Active Directory etc etc. etc.

There is no substitute for actual experience in the work place but an MSDN subscription can really help you bridge the gap.

You might also want to look into some of the MS certs like MCITP. I think this is the one that replaced the MCSE. I got an MCSE back in NT 4.0 and quite honestly it has helped me more than any other cert. Even if you dont do the certification the books and literature are pretty good.

I've been living in this arena for a long time, feel free to ping me with any questions.

Have got some old course notes (about 3 years out of date) lurking round somewhere on my storage that may be of some use to you.
If I can find them i'll upload them onto my online storage as soon as my home broadband gets connected and i'll pm you the link.