Dear Keah,
The answer is: it depends. It depends on the combined education,
experience and skills that the person brings to the position, and it
depends on the priorities for the language lab, and for the position. It
sometimes also even depends on the culture, by which I mean how much the
faculty with whom this person will work care about the person having an
advanced degree or not.

In our context, I have given as much and sometimes more credence to
significant and especially *relevant* work experience - experience working
with faculty and students, experience identifying and deploying technology
solutions to end users (preferably for learning and teaching), management
and project management experience. Also, until now, the candidates with
the M.Ed. Tech degrees whom we've interviewed relied almost exclusively on
the theory they learned, and had a hard time applying that to real-world
examples.

As for advanced degrees in other fields, it depends. We often find that
candidates with MA's or "ABD's" in language fields make good candidates,
largely because they have had to both learn and teach a foreign language,
and understand the challenges that instructors and students would want
technology to help them with.

In the end, think about what you need that can't be taught (e.g., good
customer service skills, able to relate to faculty, organized) and what
you can teach (e.g., technology).

Best, Annelie