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ITIL Qualifications

After two years of planning, scoping, development and review, a new version of the ITIL ® best practice guidelines was published on 30th May 2007.

A set of five new books, the ITIL Service Lifecycle, replaces the previous Service Support and Service Delivery books, and other related volumes:

Service Strategy
Service Design
Service Transition
Service Operation
Continual Service Improvement.

The qualification framework is being significantly revised to reflect the Service Lifecycle approach described in the new books.

The new scheme recognises the value of existing v2 qualifications and introduces a system that enables an individual to gain credits for both ITIL v2 and v3 courses. Once candidates have accumulated a sufficient number of credits they can be awarded the ITIL ® Expert in IT Service Management.

Details of the examination syllabi are being released incrementally by the Examination Institutes, but will be reflected in the following structure:

Foundation

The Foundation level focuses on knowledge and comprehension to provide a good grounding in the key concepts, terminology and processes of ITIL v3. At this level, the qualification remains very similar to the ITIL v2 Foundation qualification

The Foundation examination will follow the same format as the V2 Foundation, a closed book multiple-choice examination consisting of 40 questions to be completed in 1 hour.

The Foundation Certificate will count for 2 credits, and will be a pre-requisite of higher level courses.

There is a also a one day bridging course at Foundation which covers the differences between v2 and v3 and allows someone to take an examination to demonstrate their understanding of the ITIL v3 approach.

Service Lifecycle and Capability Streams

In the new Intermediate level, there will be two routes to achieving a new ITIL ® Expert in IT Service Management, which will replace the current Practitioner and Managers Certificate examinations:

Service Lifecycle Stream
Capability Stream

Both intermediate streams assess an individual’s comprehension and application of the concepts of ITIL v3.

Service Lifecycle Stream

The Service Lifecycle Stream is similar to the existing Management Certificate, but focusses on the 5 volumes. It is expected that there will be a qualification and course for each:

Service Strategy (SS)
Service Design (SD)
Service Transition (ST)
Service Operations (SO)
Continual Service Improvement (CSI)

Capability Stream

The Capability Stream is similar to the version 2 Practitioner courses, focussing on the processes. It is anticipated that the processes are likely to be clustered into qualifications along the following lines:

Planning, Protection & Optimisation
Service Offerings & Agreement
Release, Control & Validation
Operational Support & Analysis

ITIL v2 Practitioner qualifications count towards the ITIL ® Expert in Service Management. Depending on whether an individual holds a single topic certificate or a clustered certificate the credits will vary.

ITIL ® Expert

Candidates can acquire ’credits’ by passing examinations in either or both of the Service Lifecycle and Capability streams:

All 5 modules from the Management Stream (3 credits per module)
Modules from the Capability Stream (4 credits per module)
A mixture of both
The final “Managing Through the Lifecycle” examination (5 credits)

Candidates who already hold a version 2 Managers Certificate will have the option of:

A 4-day bridging course and examination (5 credits) to convert a version 2 Managers Certificate qualification (equivalent to 17 credits) to version 3.

Once someone has gained the requisite number of 22 credits through their education at Foundation and Intermediate level they will be awarded the ITIL ® Expert. No further examination or course is required to gain the qualification.