Getting ITIL Certified help in your career?

We all agree that ITIL® certification is the most popular IT service management,  but how do you know that it is right for you?

As an ITIL® certifications training provider, we get many such questions. This blog is intended to answer some of them, hopefully.

What is ITIL®?

ITIL® (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is the collection of industry best practices in IT service management. It is a framework, which takes care of IT service from inception to effective operations and continual improvement on regular basis.

Unlike ISO 20000, first international standard for IT service management, ITIL® is not a standard but guidelines to align your IT service management to Industry best practices. ITIL® has extensive Certification scheme, from ITIL foundation certification to ITIL® Expert and ITIL® Master. Ref: Scheme.

After the release of version ITIL® 2011, which focused on bringing consistency over the five ITIL® core publications, ITIL® gained popularity globally, and many large IT companies started adopting ITIL® for its IT service management practice.

India, as a leading IT service outsourcing nation, is observing surge in ITIL® certifications with few thousands of professionals getting certified very month on an average, since 2011.

I am a software engineer, should I consider ITIL® certification?

There are two board fields in software:  software development and software maintenance.

Software development takes a project management approach with start and end dates in developing new software applications. Software maintenance take over, once the application is developed and put into operations, business-as-usual. ITIL® plays a major role in the software maintenance side as the concepts involved is similar to IT hardware maintenance.

If you are in software maintenance, IT infrastructure, IT support and other IT service management area, ITIL® will enable you to perform your job more effectively and adds a significant value to your career.

If you plan to switch sides, you can opt for ITIL® as well to gain access to IT service management career opportunities.

How to become ITIL® Expert certified professional?

ITIL® offers extensive certification scheme for professionals based on their experience.

ITIL® foundation is mandatory certification to qualify for intermediate level certification.
ITIL® Intermediate modules are specialized courses for professionals to achieve specialist Intermediate certifications or become an ITIL® Expert.

ITIL® intermediate level has two streams: Lifecycle stream and Capability stream. Lifecycle modules focus more on managing the processes and on the other side, Capability modules go in more details to provide knowledge to practice ITIL® process’.

ITIL® expert qualification is credits based system. You need minimum of 22 credit to become ITIL expert Certified.

• ITIL® foundation gives you 2 credits
• Life cycle Intermediate modules give you 3 credits each
• Capability Intermediate modules give you 4 credits each
• A total of minimum 17 credits should be attained for taking MALC module, which provides you with 5 credits.

This gives you a minimum 22 credits required to become ITIL® expert Certified Professional.

How ITIL® help in the job market?

I get this question directly or indirectly from most of the ITIL® aspirants. Though I am equally experienced in European and Indian markets.  I scope this answer to Indian job market.

If you are  a beginner/fresher or have a couple of years of IT experience, you can target jobs such as,

• IT service delivery analyst, support engineer, technical support, help desk engineer etc..
• Entry-level jobs  in IT service management tools  such as BMC remedy, IBM Tivoli  etc..
• Many IT infrastructure jobs in MNCs providing infrastructure services  such as IBM, Amazon, HP, Mphasis etc..

At middle level, with 7+ years of experience, you would be asked to take more responsible roles such as IT service delivery manager, Incident/problem manager, release manager, service desk manager and other managerial roles.

With significant experience and deep knowledge in ITIL® , you could opt to be independent ITIL® consultant. If you are interested in academic career, you could be ITIL® trainer as well.

Please drop me a mail at ashok.a@skillogic.in , if you have any further questions on ITIL . I would be more than happy to help you understand ITIL® better.

Author : Ashok A,  ITIL Expert with 10+ years of  Industry experience, Consultant at Skillogic.