ITIL Practitioner Certificate Opens New Doors

Gaining an ITIL practitioner certificate enabled Felix to join a new company initiative

Felix works for a multi-national company who manufacture consumer products, as part of the team managing the technology infrastructure. A few months ago he realised that he needed to know more about the delivery of a service to a company such as his, in order to gain promotion in his job and move up the career path. The industry standard for service management is ITIL.

"What I was looking for was some training to give me an overview of the whole of service management. I was aware that in our department we tend to ‘fire-fight’ a lot of the time, instead of pro-actively planning our activities and being generally more organised. The ITIL Foundation course looked about right, at three days of training including the Foundation exam."

Felix attended a three day ITIL Foundation event, passed the exam easily and then considered his next steps.

"The Foundation course gave me a small amount of each of the topics of service management. In particular the key principles and models provided a framework I have been able to refer to in my job. This enables me to stop and think more carefully about what I’m doing and how this impacts everyone else. The technology aspects were interesting but not directly relevant to me at the moment, but who knows where this might lead? The really good thing about this overview for me was that it gave me enough information to help me choose the next workshop with the confidence to know I’d made the right decision."

Felix chose to attend the three-day ITIL Practitioner Certificate Service Desk and Incident Management as this was most relevant to his current role.

"I’m really keen to go on and do the ITIL Managers Certificate, but the requirement for that is to have at least five years experience working in an IT environment and the course itself is 10-11 days long. I think that’s a good target for the longer term. In the meantime my current role involves a lot of assessment and prioritisation of incidents, creation of incident records, and identification of incident solutions. There is also an on-going initiative within the department to improve the customer focus of the service desk and the incident management process, and I would really like to be involved with that. Attending this course and gaining the qualification will help me to persuade my manager to allow me to take on more responsibility."

After the course, Felix was able to assess the benefits to himself and his career:

"As I expected, the incident processing elements of the course will give me a better structure. The workshop used a Case Study so I could relate the academic elements directly to the practical issues we face on a day-to-day basis. I found that the ideas for improving the customer focus of the service desk and the incident process were excellent, and we had a great discussion on those in my syndicate group. I was surprised at how useful statistical analysis would be, and enjoyed that part of the workshop more than I had expected to. But the best thing for me was the qualification I gained, which has proved to me and my manager that I can be put in a position of adding more value to the department. I’ve had the confidence to push myself forward and am now part of the customer focus initiative."

Felix is planning to take the ITIL Managers Certificate in two years’ time.