I'm heading that way too drewbie, but I more sort of fell into managing. What worked for me was to spot problems outside of my immediate area of responsibility and then fix them (making sure you're not treading on anybody's toes :).

I get a say in the hiring process for new developers here now and, personally, I can't remember if anyone on my team has a degree. What I look for is passion. Passion for what you do and curiosity to know more. I'll even consider people with currently weak Perl skills if they've already proved they can learn and adapt. Of course, unless I get hassled directly, I only get to see the resumes HR and my boss have filtered :)

As for the getting the resume through HR - I used humor to get interviews (I had two sections on the skills part of my resume, "Things I can spell" (ie, thing's I've used but have little memory of right now), and "Things I can do". I think I also added a bullet point about "can hold a conversation without staring at my shoes" somewhere too.

But then, in a more formal corporate environment that might not quite work as well. But I'm happy sitting here in shorts and bare feet pottering away...

I think the key thing is to keep track of your achievements outside of development. How have you improved efficiency? How did you organize the dev process to improve QA? etc... and, if you are organizing chunks of work for work mates, how are you ensuring they do the work to an acceptable quality level?

My management stuff is 5% of my time, but I find that general fixing of broken processes etc takes up a lot more time.

just my .02 of rambling thoughts...

cLive ;-)