Bioinformatics jobs: is experience or education more desirable I'm a biology postdoc currently working in Data curation for a Bioinformatics institution. I am interested in becoming a Bioinformatician however I have absolutely zero experience both in terms of my education and research experience. 

Due to many responsibilities I can't just leave work and start an MSc, as much as I'd like to, plus even if I found a part-time course I could attend it's a lot of money to spend. So my question is this, what is more important for employers hiring Bioinformaticians experience or education? 

I was thinking that I could complete some of the online courses in programming, stats, bioinformatics etc. and then ask one of the researchers at my institute if I could be part of some bioinformatics projects which I could work on outside of work - my company is big on education and career development so I'm sure they would approve. 

Alternatively I have noticed that I could do the online postgrad certificate in Bioinformatics or I could do an MSc by evening class in a University about 3hrs away. I'm not sure which course is more preferable for an employer, they both cost about the same amount of money though the online course would be easier to fit around work.

Any help you guys could give me would be fantastic and it'd be great to hear from bioinformaticians or employers who have hired bioinformaticians. 

Thanks in advance,
Kate
This is really just repeat what @skymningen said in a comment.

When I was in your position I managed to secure a career development fellowship who specific purpose was to retrain lab postdocs to be bioinformaticians. It was a fantastic opportunity. But even then, this CDF involved very little class room education, and was mostly just about doing bioinformatics under the supervision of an expert. 

However, almost no one I now interview for bioinformatics positions has a formal bioinformatics education. I'm generally looking for experience and a demonstrated enthusiasm to learn new approaches in a rigorous, thoughtful and independent manner.

Thus I would definitely recommend experience over formal training. Perhaps with one caveat: you will need the basics of programming in R and probably a scripting language, so I might invest some time in online courses teaching the most basic elements of these languages. I might also be tempted to do an online course in the basics of RNA-seq analysis, so that you can run a basic reads -> alignments -> counts -> differential expression pipeline.  But these things shouldn't take you more than a week of evenings each, nothing like a MSc.