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The ITIL qualifications are available to enhance people’s understanding of some of this more technical service management information but they do not teach you how to be a manager of either your own staff, or of customers and suppliers. This vital skill, which is often underestimated, tends to come through the experiences of individuals in their role and not through specific IT training. Within ITIL V2 the qualifications were widely based around just two books from within the whole publication suite (Service Delivery and Service Support) whereas the V3 qualifications are based on the entire lifecycle; this means that a candidate being examined at V3 has been tested against a wider body of information. In saying this, the fact that the V2 Managers exam were two written answer papers allowed you to share your experience as well as the theory you had learnt with the examiner so that the papers, when marked, were often viewed as being of a wider remit than just the two publications. This sits against V3 examining approach that uses complex multi-choice as opposed to written answers. This model includes gradient scoring (above Foundation level), which basically means that you are faced with a paper where each question is not only scenario-based (so you have to understand the scenario) but also out of the four possible answers only one of them is wrong, the other three are correct but to varying degrees. The reason for saying much of this is that the qualification market as we know it is about to change; the V2 qualifications will retire and the books will cease to be published over the coming months: * V2 Foundation ended 30/06/2010 * V2 Managers ends 31/08/2010 * V2 Practitioner ends 31/12/2010 * V2-V3 Foundation Bridge ends 31/12/2010 * Managers Bridge to V3 ends (along with all publications) ends 30/06/2011 How does this leave Service Management in relation to other areas of business and IT in terms of skills and competencies? There are many ways that this question can be answered; here are a couple of ideas. Firstly, we can look at skills frameworks such as SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) which describes Service Management skills broken into the lifecycle components at a fairly granular level; whether you have used the V2 or the V3 route you can still find yourself quite easily within this framework and can begin to understand what you need to do to move yourself up to the next level within your chosen discipline. Another approach is to look into your organisation and understand what your team’s goals are and then to decide what specific skills you need. The learning outcomes of each course can then be mapped into that; the ITIL qualifications will probably cover most of what you need using this method but you should also consider what skills are actually better learnt from others within the team or from within the industry (mentoring, shadowing etc.) Whilst ITIL training and qualifications are absolutely important to development they will never cover everything and you will need to put some of the effort in to develop yourself in order to become a well rounded Service Manager. As well as relying on others to teach you, it is important that you take the bull by the horns and look to develop your own skills on top of those learnt as part of qualifications and broader IT Training.
Article Source: http://www.onlinearticlessite.com
Global Knowledge provides IT training and business skills learning to both public and private sector companies and organisations across the UK. Its core training is focused on Cisco, Microsoft, VMware and best practice. This includes ITIL Service Management and PRINCE2 which is tied into business process improvement, project management, business analysis and leadership development.
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