ITIL and IT training: why bother?

Written by Gary Flood

Time is precious and jobs are tough to get. Why go to all the time and trouble of acquiring things like an ITIL paper? Will it actually help your career? We take a balanced look at the pros and cons of building up a service management skills portfolio.

We’ve been having a debate in the ICT world for pretty much as long as we’ve had any sort of competitive market for jobs, the first book on a new computer programming language was published and someone held the first class for customers on how to drive their new piece of Big Tin: what is the point of training?

You’ve likely heard this yourself, and almost certainly mounted one of the stock arguments. When you were a junior, you used to say, “this company is a rubbish employer because it never gives me any training or develops my skillset.” When you were a contractor you used to say, “God, if only I wasn’t so busy, I’d invest the time and money to broaden my skill base so I don’t just have to hack PL/I.” And now you’re a manager, you say, “what’s the point of spending our money on training? They’re just going to waltz off and get better paid jobs with our competition.”

Sound familiar? Let’s complete the list with the one all of us have also used: “so and so’s a rubbish developer/network manager/systems analyst – all he’s got is some paper qualifications, not any real world experience.”

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