ITIL^® Certification for Teams and Organizations

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) Certification

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) Best Practices for a High Performing Workgroup

Successful, sustainable companies always prioritize satisfying stakeholders while providing value to the customer. For more and more companies, however, customer relations and the company’s information technology (IT) infrastructure have become intertwined. If this is you, then you have to manage your customer service, product development, and IT operations simultaneously to meet the expectations of your stakeholders and optimize your customers’ experience.

Continual improvement of tech-enabled products

If your company manufactures any high-tech product, be it a smartphone, fitness tracker, home automation system, or even a car, you have to strive for continual improvement of that tech-enabled product, its components, and the way it’s produced. Continual improvement is key, and this process more and more takes advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics to keep your company’s products or service on the cutting edge, and keep your company operating efficiently and effectively to stay ahead of the competition.

What the IT-infrastructure–customer support paradigm means for your company

In a nutshell, only companies that focus on continual improvement are competitive and resilient enough to survive against today’s dynamic market pressures. This is where the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) becomes your company’s best friend.

When we talk about IT infrastructure management, we mean the hardware, software, processes, policies, equipment, facilities, and anything else that improves your organization’s information flow and reduces overall IT costs. The way you manage your IT infrastructure needs to align with your needs and priorities to maximize value for your organization, your stakeholders, and your customers. ITIL is how you do that.

What is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) was developed in the 1980s by the United Kingdom’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA). It’s become the pre-eminent framework that outlines the best practices for IT service management (ITSM). ITIL is now the gold standard for improving the process efficiency of ITSM to achieve better products and improved digital service delivery.

ITSM is a systematic approach to building and maintaining a stable IT infrastructure, controlling activities like planning, designing, and delivering IT within your organization, and simplifying risk management to establish cost-effective practices that improve your organization’s efficiency and your customers’ experience.

To be clear, ITIL does not issue a set of prescriptive rules; it’s a framework for understanding how IT services are delivered and managed. ITIL provides a sustainable environment within your organization to reduce the costs associated with ITSM. With the goals that ITIL establish, you can easily create a business strategy that manages risk, reduces costs, improves productivity, and creates value to provide outcomes that satisfy the needs and expectations of your stakeholders and customers.

What are ITIL 4’s guiding principles?

ITIL 4, the latest version of ITIL, has seven guiding principles that serve as the foundation for ITSM.

Focus on value

Your company can focus on value by understanding your customers’ needs and expectations. Your best approach is to organize your ITSM activities to align your services or develop products that always provide that value based on those needs and expectations.

Start where you are

The best way to start on any journey is by taking a good look at where youare. You can then build on your existing practices and processes rather than starting from scratch. By following this principle, you can incrementally improve your current systems while avoiding disruptions to your business operations.

Progress iteratively with feedback

You can achieve continuous improvement through iterative and incremental steps based on feedback you receive from customers and stakeholders. Take that feedback to heart and use it to add value to your products or services by improving processes and aligning products to the needs of everyone involved.

Collaborate and promote visibility

Collaboration across all of your teams and departments promotes transparency and visibility in IT service delivery. Over time, this ensures that everyone involved with your organization is working toward the same goals and objectives. Your company benefits when your stakeholders and customers are aware of how your ITSM activities are creating better products and a better experience for them.

Think and work holistically

When you apply holistic thinking, you encourage your organization to consider the entire ITSM system—including people, processes, and technology—when making decisions. With a holistic approach to your organization’s procedures, you apply strategic leadership to identify the interdependencies and potential impacts of any change on your organization, your stakeholders, and your customers. This allows you to judge when and how much change you can accept at any point.

Keep it simple and practical

Keeping your ITSM activities simple allows you to avoid the inevitable issues that arise when processes are unnecessarily complex. Your organization should constantly strive to streamline your ITSM activities to efficiently manage processes, time, and costs.

Optimize and automate

One way to get ahead of the competition and stay there is to continually optimize your ITSM activities and automate them where possible. Technology is key here. Using tech to optimize and automate processes leads to extremely efficient, precise, and timely delivery of your products or services.

What is an ITIL certification?

To ensure that your company is applying the ITIL framework as effectively as possible, ITIL offers courses that lead to foundation-level, intermediate and expert certifications. You can even send your newest employees to an ITIL certification course. You can also send mid-level employees who have worked in IT support for a few years and have built up their ITSM knowledge. Accredited training organizations offer ITIL 4 training at these various levels to help your digital teams upgrade their tech knowledge and understand modern IT scenarios so you can maximize their value to your organization.

Enrolling your employees in instructor-led ITIL courses gives you a competitive edge because proper training increases your employees’ knowledge and efficiency. Your employees will also understand the prerequisites of the ITIL Foundation Certification Exam. ITIL certification is an investment of around $1,495.00 for each employee, but participants who join these courses learn from top-level instructors who teach using relevant examples and up-to-the-minute scenarios. After passing the ITIL certification exam, your employees will be able to value-stream the best ITIL practices to help put your company on top. You should choose training providers specializing in professional IT Infrastructure Management training who are authorized by PeopleCert. By using PeopleCert training providers, your employees will receive certification exam vouchers with a retake option.

You should choose training providers specializing in professional IT Infrastructure Management training who are authorized by PeopleCert. By using PeopleCert training providers, your employees will receive certification exam vouchers with a retake option.

Who benefits from the ITIL certification?

ITIL certification benefits your organization and employees who provide your ITSM activities. Professionals in ITSM roles include IT managers, service desk managers, incident managers, problem managers, change managers, service level managers, and IT project managers. When you have ITIL-trained professionals in these positions, you definitely have a leg up over any organization that doesn’t invest in ITIL training.

Added ITIL benefits

With an ITIL certification, IT professionals can demonstrate that they more fully understand ITSM than anyone without a certification. Thus, ITIL certification is beneficial for employees who work in any IT-related roles, such as IT architects, developers, network engineers, and security analysts. Your ITIL-certified employees fully understand and appreciate the ITIL principles they learn during training so they can work within the framework that ITIL provides to continually improve your company’s processes and ITSM activities for the benefit of your stakeholders and customers.

Sending your employees for training to receive their ITIL certification can also help your organization’s goal of providing top-notch products and services. Whether your company offers a product or service to customers, ITIL certification is all but necessary now because of the importance of IT in customer relations. Furthermore, IT consulting firms, managed service providers, and any other company that provides digital services to a diverse customer base absolutely needs ITIL-certified employees. ITIL provides a common language and a framework that allows companies to standardize processes and improve the quality of their products or services.

The ITIL certification is valuable for any organization that wants to improve their employees’ understanding of ITSM and enhance their value to the organization. The certification courses can help anyone, no matter how much experience they already have. Whether they’re working at your organization’s help desk or in a leadership position on one of your top-level teams, an ITIL certification will provide your company a major boost.

How can ITIL training help your current workforce?

ITIL offers proven methodologies for workforce optimization on ITSM. Applying ITIL’s framework helps your organization design, create, and deliver services or products at a level of efficiency that allows for growth and increases your company’s business value.

Offering ITIL training courses to your current workforce benefits your organization in the following way:

Improved flexibility inside the organization
Increased productivity and greater work quality
Better ITSM metrics
Enhanced communication by using appropriate ITIL terminology
Greater ability to follow and apply technology trends

What are the ITIL certification levels?

ITIL offers five certification levels.

Foundation
Practitioner
Intermediate (Service Lifecycle and Service Capability categories)
Expert
Master

How does ITIL benefit business operation?

The ITIL framework provides the best practice guidance for ITSM activities of any business and the certifications are accessible to professionals of all levels. Here are a few ways that employees with ITIL certifications can improve your business:

They prepare professionals to combat IT-related crises in the organization efficiently.
They help security analysts manage devices in an adaptable and agile way.
Intermediate (Service Lifecycle and Service Capability categories)
They train employees to improve customer satisfaction by delivering efficient services.
They provide a framework that allows IT teams to address ITSM challenges.

ITIL certification equips your employees with the knowledge, skill, and confidence to manage any ITSM-related challenge that may come up efficiently and effectively.

What job roles do ITIL-certified employees qualify for?

ITIL certification is beneficial to your company in many ways, primarily by providing employees who have IT roles in your current organizational makeup with knowledge of ITIL’s gold standard framework. Here are some examples of how ITIL certification can make your workforce more effective in their different job roles:

IT Service Managers. ITIL certification helps IT service managers confidently understand how to manage IT services, develop service strategies, design and implement service operations, improve service quality, and manage service levels.

IT Operations. With ITIL certification, IT operations professionals understand the proper ways to manage incidents, problems, and changes in IT services. Certification also allows them develop clear, well-organized standard operating procedures for IT operations to improve your entire organization’s efficiency and effectiveness.
IT Project Managers. ITIL certification provides IT project managers a clear understanding of the importance of ITSM and how it relates to IT projects. Certification also gives them the tools to integrate ITSM best practices into their project management methodology and improve the overall success of IT projects.
IT Architects. ITIL certification shows that IT architects understand how to design services that meet the organization’s needs and align with best practices for ITSM. System Architects can develop effective and efficient IT architectures to support your organization’s goals.
IT Consultants. With an ITIL certification, IT consultants can confidently guide clients in improving their ITSM processes and practices. Certification also shows that your consultants can develop effective ITSM solutions for your organization’s customers and enhance the overall value of your organizations offerings.

Key Takeaways

If you want more ROI from your technology investment, ITIL Foundation Exam certifications make it happen. Being a globally recognized framework for best practices, ITIL certification demonstrates the professionalism and knowledge of your workforce and the efficiency of your operations when it comes to the services or products your organization provides.

With training, all of your support teams, whether technical or non-technical, can understand the best practices that are currently in use. For your investment in ITIL training, you get a digitally savvy workforce that satisfies your stakeholders and customers with outstanding support, superior products and top-level services.

By the end of each ITIL certification course, your employees get the technical knowledge that allows them to confidently take on new ITSM challenges in the industry. Your stakeholders and customers will thus know your professionals to have the practical skills to meet their expectations and needs. ITIL certification concretely shows that your workforce can rise to any challenge to bring value to the products or services your company offers.

Extending training to your senior staff to receive ITIL expert- or even ITIL master-level certification reinforces their skills and solidifies their knowledge of the ITIL framework. This allows them to competently manage the different roles in your organization’s tech infrastructure.

For junior employees, the ITIL foundation certificate puts them on a career path to becoming valuable assets to any tech team you assign them to. Certification shows that they understand the framework and their part in it, and they have the language to communicate with other certified members of the IT teams to eliminate confusion when different teams are working together.

ITIL-4 teaches your staff how to manage servers, which can help your business effectively manage risks and disruption. ITIL-4 is the most cost-effective way to grow your employees’ knowledge so they can become tech-savvy leaders in the industry.

CCS Learning Academy is a pre-eminent IT training provider in the United States, having offered tech training to junior employees and expert-level professionals for over 25 years. Your organization can soar above the rest as your employees learn the best practice frameworks for ITIL and many other certifications. To learn more about our upcoming online courses, contact us!

ITIL Certification: For teams and organizations