I have an IMC, it is a good qualification as an introductory overview, but you won’t get any recognition for it so it is a waste of money. If you don’t want to / can’t do CFA then you could probably do a Mickey Mouse MSc, but not the CQF. Get better at developing, you will have a more fruitful career path in the long term.

CFA is the best qualification, otherwise an MSc Finance from Cass would be amazing for Front Office roles. MTF is good but for specialist positions and difficult to enter in the current climate, the broader the better

YMCA!

You are really asking two different questions here….

1) should I take a professional or an academic qualification while I am working
2) which qualification would be improve my chances of becoming a <>

But the problem is, you don’t state what the blank is and you list a plethora of courses.

Professional qualifications:
IMC, CFA, CFQ….
IMC is an entry level qualification, but has the advantage that it is quick to obtain, about 100 hours and study and regarded as threshold competent by the FSA. There are other study programme like this, but this is the one most used by the buy-side still.
CFA is typically a three year programme, it is very broad but not very deep. Unless you want to become an equity analyst, it is unusual to see CFA as listed as “essential” is job adverts, and even tin this instance an MBA is usually acceptable too. I strongly disagree with the earlier poster who stated that you couldn’t obtain a masters if you couldn’t pass level 1. The statistics on passing CFA are very low, so much so that the CFA Instituate has been accused of “fixing” and besides, they are completely different in style. CFA replies on a candidate dumping a lot of superficial information int heir short-term memory to pass whereas postgraduate courses are typically about depth of understanding.
CFQ – this is a specialist course. There has been a fairly large turnout of quants in recent years from various financial maths courses at universities at the same time that the demand for quants has shrunk. Unless you already work in this area or see that it would particularly add value to a skill set then I would probably steer clear. Any MSc in Financial Maths, Financial Engineering or even Applied Statistics will cover the same stuff, except perhaps C++ (ie Ito, fourier, greeks, sde’s etc)

Academic qualifications
I don’t know anything about those particular courses at CASS. You might also look at Birkbeck College for evening MSc programmes in maths, statistics, economics, finance and commodities. I can’t comment either on MBAs, only to say that if you are considering an E-MBA it suggests that you already have a number of years of work experience under your belt and you might bear this in mind when selecting a programme of study. You also might check the cost of an MBA versuses the future expected pay-off at your particular point professionally.

The thing about academic qualifications versuses professional ones are that they are about depth rather than breath and hence are more transferable to other industries. They signal to an employer that you are capable of learning.