How did you get off the IT Front-Lines?

[microcentillion]

It's starting to feel like an impossible task. I've got MCITP: EA & SA, working towards CCENT, and I've got training towards VCP and RHCE. However, all my jobs have been very front-line with workstation management as my primary responsibility, and without being directly responsible for these technologies in production environments, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to break out of the $30k jobs. Someone else has to have endured/defeated the catch-22 of enterprise-level sysadmin experience. Any pointers?