Hans has mentored Linuxities in Phoenix (and California at ScaLe) for many years now and is supposed to be a fair teacher.
Security careers are not just pursued through any one arena.
WE ARE ALL responsible for SECURITY in our own lives, with technology, and in our professions.
Security compartmentalization can be a huge problem, especially when we attempt to educate the masses.
The best way to get into security is to DO IT. Since there is a great deal of material covering the full OSI stack, and many protocols, we suggest that you attend DefCon in Las Vegas. Also, studying for and taking ANY certification is one of the requirements.
After you have one or two respectable certs to your name, you can pretty much work anywhere. They are not going to quibble about less than 2 years experience. You can gain experience by attending local events from UAT, to DeVry Hackfests, to OWASP monthly groups.
Assuming and requiring someone else will "educate you" is antithical to hacker thinking. You have the ability to "go look". You can by taking things apart, start observing (using regular tools from Firefox Developer plugin to gdb, to an inline sniffer) security behaviors.
I recommend you go to the Phoenix Public Library and read every Security book they have (excluding fiction). They have a few study guides as well for certifications. It's recommended that you take a class ONLY if you don't feel confident to go through the materials and take the test successfully. I recommend that you also READ the full OWASP site, and play with the various security distros and tools (Nexus scanning, free scan tools and network discovery tools).
Somewhere along the line you will find an affinity to one area: forensics, virus, VLAN Layer 3/VPN, application including SQL injection, web applications, bluetooth, wireless, buffer overflow/fuzzing, systems exploits via patch management holes, human social engineering. While you might get glazy-eyed with one particular area of security, it's doubtful you will actually have the opportunity to work in that one area.
Most baby security analysts (without a 4 year degee) are ticket hockey resources, as I have said before. If you have the capacity for pure research, or coding, you can write plugins for Metasploit for instance - getting a name for yourself via your open source contributions. Putting up a blog and hanging out your shingle (after you have a certain confidence) for the purposes of scanning web systems or assisting with post exploit forensics. Putting on presentations for local groups and submitting to DefCon is you have something really cool or noteworthy (which will come from full immersal into all things security) will get you noticed and raise your stock.
Again, while a degree or classes are NOT necessary, some employers, like the NSA and Federal Government require education for each one of their GS levels. They do hire contractors from time to time, but if you plan to work on the cutting edge of cyber security - government is where it's at.
So, I will question you:
1) Do you have a copy of Backtrack5 or another exploit distro available and have you going through the tools available?
2) Have you watched every video available on YouTube?
3) Have you scanned or tested your own systems?
Those are basic things we all need to be doing (not just security professions) but it gives you a place to start.