Anybody?

Good short answer, in my opinion, a good pen tester should have experience in many disciplines since it is never known what you will be asked to do.  As for remediation, absolutely, if you discover vulnerabilities that are exploitable then your report should include steps to fix or prevent exploitation of the vulnerabilities.  Some are not simply fixed by patching but configuration.  As for knowing how to program, well knowone expects you to code Operating systems, but if you have that knowledge on top of networking and web app testing, well you may have a pretty good arsenal to throw at the environment.  I think now-a-days most IT security folk come from one background or another, there are few that come right out of gates as security pros.  Though if we were all doing our first jobs correctly, many of us could say we've been practicing security for how ever many years.  But now we get to concentrate on it and our opinions tend to mean more to management when they come from someone with a Security title.

So learn some code, learn about networking and learn your systems.  Learn how to use some tools to help you figure out the best path of exploitation.  Learn how to hack people.  If you are lucky enough to be part of a pen testing team, well then you can concentrate more on an aspect of the job.

And yes, anything posted by Sil is always worth the read.  He has a great writeup on getting into ethical hacking.

Ever since I started my pentesting/ Info Assurance journey, I feel like the list of stuff you need to know is endless. I thought "hey, Ill learn to hack in a year, get some certs, then bam! job here I come". Wow, was I sadly mistaken. There is so much to learn and the learning never stops.

Once I started learning about exploits, I needed to learn programming and assembly language (which doesnt happen over night). And to go along with WCNA, there are so many different types of languages..you need to figure out exactly what you want to do, then someone can tell you whats the best language to learn.

I begin three years ago:

Go deep in windows servers
Security and Cisco certifications
I read somebooks about pentest (I never did one outside of my lab yet).
Now Linux
Later some programing and script
After some scripting/programming OSCP
Everytime I said, I need to learn more of this......