From what I've seen from respective employers,. no one really cares for PHP/MySQL knowledge, and it's never really used by most businesses for their web sites. However, if you know JSP, Oracle, MS SQL, and ASP/ASP.NET, then I really can't see where you could go wrong. As far as qualifications go, I'm not sure what they would actually want from you. I'm sure that some kind of degree would be wanted, or at the very least, an extensive portfolio of work for different companies. From what I've heard from my lecturers however, when it comes to programming, employers prefer to have younger people working for them, which is why many programmers go into Systems Analysis later on.

Originally Posted by YoungCoder I intend to become a computer game programmer for a bit of money but more as a hobby considering i will be making millions myself by then anyway

Ah yes, I think we've all had that dream.