Having done IT in the past, I think the educational programs are great for someone lacking experience who needs to demonstrate capability, so by all means he should go for whatever on that list interests him. But I also recommend some outside-of-class "study" time tinkering with computers and networks.
[sorry about the length of this, I'm waaay too geeky when it comes to this stuff]
Linux/UNIX system administration can be learned by taking an old PC and installing Linux on it. Set it up as a web server and build a little website. Install a database. Then install Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla!, whatever. Set up a DHCP and DNS server. Try to find some old hard disks and assemble them into a RAID array. See if you can migrate the entire system over to the RAID array without reinstalling (if you can figure this out, you'll understand Linux internals way better than most). Set it up as a file/print server with Samba. Install Postfix and figure out how to set it up as an internal mail server. For a big challenge, try backing up everything you've done, blowing away the installation, and setting it up again from your backup configuration files. If you want it to be even harder, try restoring with a different Linux distribution than the one you originally used to set it all up (!!!) Are you sure you didn't miss anything? Big jobs require a pretty extensive test plan to make sure you didn't, say, get DHCP/DNS working again but the database is still broken.
Cisco equipment requires practice to really get good at it, especially for someone new to networking. Find an old, surplus Catalyst switch on Craigslist (a multilayer one is best like the 3750, but all this stuff can be expensive). Set up a small network including the Linux server. Reconfigure the link to the server as a VLAN trunk, and enable VLAN tagging on the server. Set up a router (either an actual router from CL, another PC, a multilayer switch, or the toy one you already have with iptables) and get your different LAN segments to talk to each other. Set up IPv6. Borrow other friends' or family members' laptops to connect to your network and see if they play nice on it.
All of the above would probably take someone months to figure out the first time, but the experience will be better than anything learned in a course. The courses will help him get that first job, but the tinkering will make him excel at that job and lead to all future raises, promotions, and better jobs later. Playing around with stuff like this can also help narrow focus and figure out what he really enjoys the most (by the way, enjoying all of it is okay, too; there are plenty of small businesses with one "IT Guy" who has to do everything)
By doing a bunch of self-study, you are also learning the MOST important skill in IT: the ability to use Google. If you're just following step-by-step instructions to set something up, or you're asking the instructor, you're NOT acting like an IT person. An IT person is frequently confronted with a crazy, weird problem (including the step-by-step instructions being wrong) and there's no instructor to ask for help (and more often than not your boss barely knows how to log in to his PC). The company will be relying on you to figure out the answer, and the secret weapon is to Google it. Knowing how to weed out irrelevant information in the problem, isolate the component that's failing, then looking online for the reason why is what IT people do that makes them so valuable. Fixing that problem, which is indistinguishable from magic to the general population, is also one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.