If you are truely serious, I can find out from my dad. He manages a handful of system DBAs and works pretty closely with application DBAs. There's probably other flavors of DBAs, but I'm familiar with those two. You may want to check out which flavor interests you. Once you do, you'll have an easier time figuring out what you need to do to land that kind of job.
Talking about jobs, HIT UP A JOB SITE and search for jobs in YOUR AREA and look for the available DBA positions. Read the ads! Find out what the requirements are. If you want a job in your area, you'll need those requirements. Period.
Also important is to understand what the popular RDBMS in your town is. In Cleveland Ohio, its an Oracle town. In Columbus Ohio, its about 30% Oracle and the rest MS SQL (rough numbers given by my dad). If you're an MS SQL person, you'll have a tough time getting in to an Oracle shop (for example).
For system DBAs, you have GOT to have experience. Example: the database goes down. You get paged at 2am. What do you do? What is your recovery plan? In cases like this, if you don't have the experience, you won't know if you're making the right decision and make the wrong one could really mess things up. Employers are fully aware of this and hire accordingly.
I think there's assciate DBAs and junior DBAs. If you have little or no experience, then this is the position you want to try getting into (I think - this is based off of some old memories).
As for certs, it DEPENDS ON THE PERSON reviewing your resume. My dad, he wants to see experience when he's hiring. He'll look at those with a 4 year degree first, BUT he's willing to also look at those who may have some college but jumped into the industry. He knows those folks will have experience (it'll then be his job to interview them and find out if they're BS-ing or if they know their stuff). But he said in another department in his company, the manager there strictly looks at people with degrees and certs.
Application DBAs are a bit different and I don't have a huge amount of info on them. Although I'm hoping to one day wiggle myself into this line of work.
