certification

Here's hoping the upcoming (any day now, apparently) COBIT User's Guide for Service Managers is closely followed by a certification. Imagine "COBIT Certified Service Manager". Wouldn't that put a cat amongst the ITIL pigeons?

[This post has been rewritten. I got it wrong and it contained errors of fact. So one or two of the comments don't quite follow on from the revised text]

Call of a crow!!* What is going on in Castle ITIL? Is there a battle royal between vendor factions? The whole V3 Certification thing is lurching around like a pantomime donkey where the front guy has flatulence. e-learning is now in the syllabus (I am told but cannot confirm that it was not explicitly specified previously). This leads to a dire prediction for ATOs if Castle ITIL decides to cut out the middleman...

There is an excellent online credit calculator on APMG's ITIL Official Site that I hadn't noticed before (thanks to Rocky K.K. Lam) .

I seldom read vendor bumph. But just this once as I was cleaning out an old conference bag the headline of a flyer caught my eye. It is clever.

This post has been podcast

Yet another unhappy camper prompted me to hammer on the cold stone walls of Castle ITIL once again, right over the blood-stains of last time I tried. But I won't. I give up. ITIL training and certification isn't going to change. It has been taken over by the money engine and is lost. The real experts are elsewhere.

Most readers of this blog know this stuff but certainly not all so here's the IT Skeptic's shaky understanding of the world of ITIL V3 certification. I welcome corrections and elaborations.

The IT Skeptic has confirmed pretty reliably that ITIL V3 Intermediate and Expert exams will NOT be available online without an associated training course. [updated: no it isn't. things changed between the start and end of August. Online training is back on!]

The ITIL V3 examinations are seriously flawed. "Subjective" and "multi-choice" don't go together.

[Updated: APMG, the official accreditor of ITIL, have their own online sample exam of 40 questions!] Here are eight six seven eight links to free ITIL Version 3 practice exams to help you on your quest for ITIL V3 Foundation certification. The IT Skeptic has not worked through them so we make no comment on the quality of the questions, but evaluating that for yourself is a useful exercise.