Who came first: The chicken or the egg? (trying to answer the question why APMG/EXIN accredited ITIL
Posted in Service Management Update on Jan 16th, 2009 No Comments »
WOW - that is one massive title…
The reason why I wanted to write about this subject of ITIL V3 intermediate exams is because I find it very difficult to ’sell’ this policy to my accredited trainers and our delivery partners.
This is the issue:
The Art of Service (and every other Accredited Training Organization) has to employ accredited trainers to be able to deliver the ITIL certification programs. This is part of the accreditation stipulation and we pay an annual fee per trainer for this accreditation, I get that.
But, with the new ITIL V3 certification stream APMG has also changed the trainer requirements. It is now a requirement that:
every trainer who wishes to teach any of the ITIL V3 intermediate programs has to have their ITIL V3 Expert certificate AND the certificate of the program they are going to teach.
From a quality point of view, I sorta-kinda get that as well. For our organisation this means that each trainer must sit 10 exams (!!) as there are 4 ITIL V3 Intermediate Capability exams and 5 ITIL V3 Intermediate Lifecycle exams PLUS the Managing Across the Lifecycle. As we have course material for each of those programs, and anticipate to deliver all of them - we have to be prepared and have each trainer qualify for all possible courses…
But - what I don’t understand is why accredited trainers have to pay full retail for sitting their exams? This is why I started to think about this as a chicken-and-egg conundrum.
1. It is due to the trainers and their interaction with students that ITIL has become such a powerful and globally accepted management framework. And I am sure both EXIN and APMG reap the benefits from that! Also, don’t forget that we have to pay an annual fee for the trainer accreditation as well. However, on the other hand…
2. Looking at the obvious fact that APMG is a commercial organisation they are probably trying to squeeze every dollar out of the industry. Could it be that APMG hasn’t sold as many exams as they promised to OGC at the beginning of their contract last year, so what better way to beef up the sales figures than by first mandating that all trainers must sit for the exams and then following this up with a full price charging mechanism for said exams. That is an amazing way to make sales and revenue figures - almost a license to print money! The trainers have no choice but to sit for the exams…. kaaaaching!!
Without trainers you don’t have accredited courses so no exam participants - which means no $$$ for APMG. And by charging for each trainer exam, I am sure people will become very selective in the type of exams they are going to sit for. Less trainers means less students, means less knowledge about the framework, which means that it is less well-known (and/or implemented incorrectly so it doesn’t clearly offers the value to the organization) which brings the risk that IT organizations will be looking at alternatives… Cobit anyone?!
Ivanka Menken
COO - The Art of Service
