It's certainly an interesting situation to be in (one I was in not long ago) - here's my 0.02.QA is the way into QA Management and, beyond that, general management. That's the end of that story. People hiring programmers do not see years of experience in QA as any kind of valid development experience (because it's not ;)). Tech Support is the way into systems administration, which is a job many people enjoy and with good reason; but great sys admins don't make good application developers. Think of it this way: when hiring a developer to work on a J2EE commercial application as part of a large team of engineers, employers don't look for X years of experience setting up/maintaining networks and writing perl scripts. They are equally valuable but totally different professional paths, as has been pointed out above.The way into development is simple - Internships, Graduate Programs and Junior Developer positions. Simple as that. You want a job as a developer, get a job as a developer. If you have a good degree (I didn't really) then there are plenty of companies (especially financial institutions) who are waiting to hoover new grads up into their tailor-made new grad programs. Great pay, great perks, but like I say, you need a good degree. There are however plenty of these positions available; crucially, if you don't have professional experience, work on something - anything, starting perhaps by polishing your final year project if you have one - to give yourself some kind of portfolio to show to people.If having finished an undergraduate program you don't meet the degree requirements with the investment banks and can't find any Junior positions elsewhere, my advice would be to consider further education. Some kind of masters program with a vocational focus can provide a great springboard into a particular sphere of development, as well as giving you the chance to build your own portfolio of work, not to mention giving you a higher-level degree. I've seen MSc programs in all kinds of fields from Enterprise Development (i.e. J2EE etc) to Distributed Computing to Computer Games Technology (what I ended up doing).Anyway - best of luck!