Welcome to CE, #-Link-Snipped-# . Certifications might offer a marginal advantage to you, but your best bet seems to be finding a development role in the current organisation itself. Your first priority should be to look for opportunity in your current organisation and make sure that you're prepared with general knowledge of programming. Your educational background will be a big plus.

Talk to your managers, team leads and HR people and tell them about what you wish to do. Have solid reasoning to back your wishes so that they're convinced that you'd be a better performer if given an opportunity in the development role.

It's not *TOO* difficult to switch from system admin to development role. I've had a friend who did exactly the same; but it took him 2 long years to make the transition. He's doing pretty well as a developer because of his background in system administration.