What About It Service Management Training Accredited ?

Q: what about It Service Management Training Accredited ? Which course did you go on? one of the HDI / itSFM courses? How do you think it compares with the stuff from BECTa (ie FITS on the Tech Support Advisory Service)?

A:The trouble with ITIL as it stands at the moment (unless its changed in the last 6 months) is that it's an 'old boys club' (sort of) when it comes to who can deliver the courses and it also suffers from the way that the certifications are arranged - you either have to have an approved invigilator come to hold the exams or you attend an authorised testing site. You cannot self-study or arrange your own training and then take the exams as your course has to be held by an approved trainer too. Fair enough, it maintains standards but it also keeps the cost up - which is fine if you are a corporate who wants to 'do ITIL', but as you hint, the smaller outfits find it expensive. A company for which I used to work had been working in the customer service/help desk training and consultancy marketplaces for around 15 years and had also developed general and bespoke customer service/management/service delivery courses for numerous other training organisations and blue-chip companies - we approached the BCS/ISEB to be accredited to run ITIL courses and also to have our own material approved, but the hoops we were expected to jump through and the money we were expected to pay for the privilege were crazy. To cap it all, even though we could deliver the courses with our eyes shut due to our industry experience, the timescale to be approved was going on for 8+ months - mainly because we had to put at least one trainer through all the relevant ITIL courses and some were not run that regularly, plus the time taken for the powers-that-be to process all the paperwork wasn't exactly speedy. The net result of all this was that there were only a limited number of companies authorised to run ITIL courses, they were expensive to use (supply/demand) and they were overwhelmed with work and so their ability to run some courses in the near future wasn't good. In the end, we approached a number of the major ITIL authorised training organisations (I seem to recall there were about 5 at the time) with a view to developing a partnership and because we had an opportunity to train 60+ staff for one of our customers and needed to get things setup for a course in about 2 months time - the sound of the barriers being put up was deafening. Try as we might we only persuaded one organisation to work with us and they quoted stupid prices for us to use their approved material and then just as we struck a deal and confirmed all the details with the customer, they realised that we could not be an associate for various bureaucratic reasons (having assured on numerous occasions that we *could*) and backed out of their commitments leaving us in the lurch and all the deals fell through.

Discuss It!

Most Popular Articles

More