The internet is widely peppered with articles that serve as introductions to ITIL training and certification. Many of them, like this one at CIO, explicitly point out that it is “near the top of almost every list of must-have IT certifications.” Those same articles will tell you that ITIL training and certification provides the aspiring professional with understanding of a wide range of best practices in the field of IT service management. This description certainly speaks to the essential practical importance of that skill set for employers in the field. But it also points to the foundational role of ITIL training for persons who pursue a broader set of certifications.
The CIO article mentions some examples of solutions that an employee can help his or her company to devise based on ITIL training and certification. These run the gamut from improved efficiencies in website redesign to cost-saving measures in overall institutional practice. But an essential feature of these sorts of examples is their general nature. At least at its lower levels, ITIL training and certification helps a person to analyze problems and devise the necessary interventions. But the actual implementation of those solutions is something different entirely.
A Foundation for Development
Certainly, ITIL training and certification will also help you to better understand where to direct the company or relevant department heads in order to see your solutions through. But if you aspire to something greater within your profession, the same skill set can also point you in the direction of further information technology training programs, which might allow you to more fully implement solutions once you have identified them.
The CIO article, as well as other articles like it, highlights some of the complementary qualifications that one might develop on their way to ITIL mastery. That is to say, there are several specific skills that are built directly into the framework of ITIL training and certification. But at the same time, virtually any peripheral information technology training program can be seen as complementing ITIL. If, for instance, your ITIL expertise points your company to a software-based solution to certain inefficiencies, then there may be relevant software training courses in the USA that will help you to better understand the ultimate outcomes of your general recommendations.
Building Up or Building Out
Naturally, the personal relevance of any such peripheral training depends upon the role that you play in your company or your field. But this is rarely something that you control completely. IT professionals, like many other workers, find their roles shifting or expanding in sometimes unexpected ways as their careers develop. Fortunately, ITIL training and certification provides you with a foundation from which to build your skills in multiple directions.
On the one hand, if you retain a rather general IT service role, you might be well served by building your skills upward through successive levels of ITIL training and certification, all the way to the Master Qualification. On the other hand, if you begin to develop more specialized interests or recognize unexpected opportunities, you can build your skill set outward through other forms of information technology training. Lower-level ITIL training and certification should prove equally useful in either case.
This is quite relevant to the previous post at this blog, which discussed PMP training in terms of broader career planning and even touched upon the idea that ITIL training and certification could be a means of getting one’s foot in the door before expanding their professional role with other skills.