The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Common sense around ITIL V3 certification paths"

You hit the nail on the head

pjotrg — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:12:02 +0000

It is indeed all marketing, from the ITIL certification scheme right up to the trainings. And the buyers (often purchasing departments) buy based on price and if possible (for the same price) the good name of the training institute. So all there is left to really make the difference in a "Practitioner" or "Manager" training is the trainer (that's also why I personally do not believe in online training for intermediate, especially capability, modules)
As for instructor led trainings: adding extra content and practice will make the course longer and thus more expensive.......

The exams certainly do not make a difference. Last week I passed all nine lifecycle and capability modules (just failed one of them) and experienced really very few difference between both exams. I actually found some Capability exams more easy than the Lifecycle ones and also found questions in some exams that actually had nothing to do with the theme of the exam.

So I think we need a good old revolution in certification and training! Somewhat like the storming of the Bastille in France..........

Changing the label on the can...

ianclayton — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:32:36 +0000

Please excuse my senile moment here, but where is the 'practitioner' content in V3?

By most definitions, anyone attending a practitioner class would expect to come away with vital information on how to actually do what the title implies.... Practice.

This said, you might expect a class to include a bit of 'how to', such as how to design, develop and sustain a minor item such as a change schedule, or maintenance schedule, or service schedule, or even a release schedule... What about how to gather and define customer requirements, or discover the basis for customer satisfaction.... How to define a problem and its impact. How to design classification criteria to record incidents and the importance of matching top-and-tail classifications to report on 'printer problem coming in, network fix on the way out'.

Now if a vendor is using good old 'marketing techniques' akin to changing the label on the can of dog food to read "made form succulent cuts of the best meat", when they really should be saying "made from leftovers scraped up from the cutting floor after we have separated out all the human usable stuff", or "the beach is just a short walk (across a five lane freeway and a minefield of beggars) from your hotel" - to get a sale - then lets call it out.

If they are ADDING the missing how to - well done - I'm sure folks will appreciate the additional 'practitioner' guidance, albeit at the expense of exam preparation time - unless of course the class is longer than required by the syllabus.

Remember - V2 trumpeted 'practitioner' classes and it fell flat because it lacked the vital 'how to'. So I repeat my question - can anyone pick a book and point me to the practitioner information. Please don't tell me we are education folks to be 'Service Strategists', 'Service Portfolio Managers', or 'Service Design Managers' on these books alone...

Kudos to some organizations who actually market closer to the facts.... and call their ITIL Foundation class an 'exam boot camp'.

Pink

Visitor — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:27:55 +0000

Skep,

Pink did nothing magical here as most of the other ATO's figured the naming thing out a long time ago...I actually wrote a DITY on it.

As Sharon stated in her response to this...they left it up to the ATO's to package the classes based on the value they are delivering to their students. I think Pink did it more for their sales force more than anything else...especially with public class enrollments down. The next thing you are going to tell me is that Pink invented the online ITIlk training market(-:

rick