Skills Required for ITIL Professionals – ITIL is considered as the best practice framework that guides/supports organizations and individuals to gain optimal value from IT and digital services. It is becoming popular and important as it equips a service provider with a clear capability model, aligns them to the business strategy and customer needs. ITIL has recently switched from ITIL v3 to ITIL 4 that is much more relevant to service management practitioners, software developers, and businesses for better delivery of IT services. It plays a vital role by emphasizing the importance of transparency, collaboration, automating, and working holistically. It is a global standard in IT best practices used by millions of practitioners. Most interesting, it is relied upon by almost 90% of the FTSE 500 to run their IT operations.
ITIL promotes a stronger alignment between business and Information Technology. It is offering improved service delivery and increased customer satisfaction. ITIL represents the greater visibility of IT costs and assets. It can also reduce costs via improved utilization of resources. ITIL is crucial nowadays as it provides better management for business risk and service disruption or failure. It can also help you lead to better business outcomes through effective communication across the business.
Nowadays, we witness a high demand for ITIL professionals. There are ITIL certifications available that one can opt for and start a successful career in this domain. Here we are going to discuss the required skills for ITIL professionals that one must gain necessarily.
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What Is ITIL?
The term ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It provides a clear focus on TCO (total cost of ownership) to reduce the costly expenses related to IT investments. It provides guidance and structure to the organizations, minimizing the unscheduled work overtaking and de-railing current tasks and activities. ITIL’s flexible nature allows you to take on new tasks with ease with a more motivated workforce. Its main goal is to ensure that IT services are aligned with business objectives, even as business objectives change.
The most important part of ITIL is the configuration management database CMDB, which provides the central authority for all components that involve software, services, documents, IT components, users, and hardware. On the other hand, ITIL principles help you to get to the root cause of problems in your environment, right visibility into the systems and people to avoid future problems.
ITIL is not only beneficial for businesses but also for individuals. Professionals who successfully complete an ITIL qualification are able to perform many tasks. They can apply the techniques and tools to their day-to-day job in order to increase effectiveness and efficiency. Certified ITIL professionals can take ideas back to their workplace to improve customer satisfaction. ITIL’s common language can help in improving communication that can lead to increased confidence and gain reassurance through the ITIL community.
Skills Required for ITIL Professionals
ITIL was introduced in the 1980s decade and the process has gone through several changes. It is also keeping up with the new and advanced technologies in the IT space. Its latest version is ITIL V4 certifications that too with ITIL 4 Managing Professional Modules and ITIL 4 Managing Transition Modules. ITIL helps businesses manage risk, build cost-effective strategies, strengthen customer relations for a sustainable IT environment. So every professional must learn some basic and important skills to become a successful ITIL expert in order to gear up an organization’s growth, profit, and development.
Required Skills for ITIL professionals are:
- Understanding of Management skills
- Strong knowledge of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics
- Understanding of technology-enabled business capabilities like DevOps
- Knowledge of BRM (Business Relationship Management)
- Ability and interest to manage customers
- Good Collaboration skills and excellent communication skills
- Analytical and problem-solving skills
- Interest to learn new industry updates
- Flexibility, Enterprising, Agility, and Innovative performance
- Analytical mind-set
- Strong Management skills and Communication skills (written and verbal)
- Observation skills and deep interest to solve difficult business problems
- Negotiation skills
If someone wants to build a career in ITSM (Information Technology Service Management), getting an ITIL certification is the logical course of action. It showcases your required knowledge and capability to make a significant contribution to ITSM in an organization and can increase the marketability to future employers all around the world.
Few more skills required to learn before starting an ITIL career
- IT Service Strategy- An important step to know how to achieve business benefits from IT operations is to gain ITIL Intermediate Service Strategy certification that can empower IT professionals to effectively perform their duties like designing, planning, development, and implementation of IT service management. It helps to identify risks, challenges, critical success factors in the IT service lifecycle, and create/operate customer-centric IT service strategies. It is also predicted by many IT groups that IT service strategy is becoming a key business motivation for management teams.
- Operational Support and Analytics- This skill supports IT managers to identify improvements to the implementation of IT processes to support and deliver customer services, incidents, manage events, and technical problems across the whole IT lifecycle. Operational support and analytics skills can transform people and processes into high-quality and cost-effective IT services. OSA training within the ITIL framework can make these vital improvements to your ITSM strategy.
- DevOps- Development Operations or DevOps is one of the fastest-growing fields in the ITSM space that offers millions of new job opportunities arising for aspiring IT professionals. A report says that around 53% of organizations required developers to take part in application deployment, and almost 43% required operations to become involved in feature development and in new products. These professionals are in a high-demand as they can understand mission-critical aspects of the equation and apply the principles of development and deployment.
- Continual Service Improvement- This skill helps companies to improve the effectiveness of their ITSM processes and bake in continual change. It can also help companies to be on the lookout for redundancies, poor use of resources, and errors. ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI) helps IT professionals apply metrics to address ITSM risks and challenges. And do it in a way that helps quantify the business benefit of IT operations.
So these are the required skillsets for ITIL professionals to land a career in the evolving IT world.
