ITIL Foundation Certified Professionals: The New Breed

I had been a bit busy for last couple of days with my organizational activities. Also, I had been interviewing potential candidates for openings that we have for various ITIL operational roles. I have come across many ITIL foundation certified professionals, whom I would prefer to call a new breed of ITIL professionals.

One of the candidates I interview had mentioned ‘Foundation Certified in IT Service Management’ and ITIL V3 Foundation certified. I asked him ‘what is the difference between these two certifications’…answer was ‘I don’t know’.

My next question – ‘What are the various lifecycle phases of ITIL V3’…I got another blank face…I went on to next question ‘Name any 5 processes of ITIL V3’…again a blank face and then an answer ‘I don’t know’. I asked ‘you are ITIL V3 Foundation certified and I expect the name of ITIL processes at least’…A great answer I got ‘My company asked us to get certified. I was shocked. I thought that this would be a one of case. But thereafter I have found many guys like him, who do not even recall the process names. Another interesting case was when I asked one candidate, ‘which version of ITIL you are certified in’…he thought for a while and then answered ‘Version 1’. He had completed his engineering in 2006, probably would have been just a couple of years old when ITIL version 1 was introduced.