The best way to pass any exam is to gather and prepare with the help of appropriate planning strategies. In this way, they allow you to differentiate yourself from the crowd as you will be professionally involved in your field of interest. This ITIL® 4 Foundation certification introduces candidates to ITIL® 4 and helps them gain a deeper understanding of IT service management by looking at the creation, delivery, and continuous improvement of tech-based products and services through an end-to-end operating model.
Certification allows you to set yourself apart and add value to your ITIL skillset and resume. In the past few years, the IT industry has seen great growth, so making a career in it can be extremely lucrative. It is quite challenging to acquire this kind of certification, as they help you determine the best direction for you. Let's explore this valuable credential in more detail.
Who Conducts ITIL Exam?
To become ITIL 4 Foundation certified, you need to pass the ITIL exam. Since 2013, ITIL exams are administered by Axelos, a partnership between Capita and UK Cabinet Office. Axelos also licenses other institutes to train and conduct ITIL exams on its behalf. It owns the trademark and IP pertaining to the ITIL exam and ITIL framework. These organizations are known as Accredited Training Organizations (ATO).
What does The ITIL Exam Cover?
ITIL exam options include Practitioner, Intermediate, Expert, and Master. The ITIL exam certifies you according to your expertise level. The ITIL Framework allows you to demonstrate your competency and skills as you move forward through the ITIL Exam for Foundation. The ITIL Foundation exam serves as the entry-level certification.
Be Familiar with the Purpose and Key Terms of 15 ITIL Practices
The following ITIL practices serve the following purposes:
Information Security Management: It is a major responsibility of information security for the organization to protect the information that it needs to conduct its business, including the understanding and management of security risks such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability, as well as authentication and nonrepudiation.
Relationship Management: It is the organization's responsibility to build relationships at a strategic and tactical level with all stakeholders, including identifying, analyzing, monitoring, and continuously improving relationships with them.
Supplier Management: Developing closer, more comprehensive relationships with key suppliers to uncover and realize new value and reduce the risk of failure is key to managing the organization's suppliers effectively.
IT asset Management: Assist the organization in planning and managing the full lifecycle of its IT assets to maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support the decisions about which assets to purchase, re-use, retire, and dispose of, and to comply with regulatory and contractual requirements.
Monitoring and Event Management: Identifying and prioritizing services, processes, infrastructure, and information security events, and determining the appropriate response to those events. This is accomplished by systematically observing services and service components and recording changes of state identified as events.
Release Management: To provide new and updated services and features.
Service Configuration Management: Information on how configuration items are configured and the relationships between them must be accessible when and where it is needed, including information on how the configuration items are configured.
Deployment Management: Any component that needs to be moved into live/staging/test environments, whether it be hardware, software, documentation, processes, or others.
Continual Improvement: In order to align products, services, and ITIL practices of the organization with changing business needs, the organization continues to improve its products, services, and practices.
Change Control: In order to maximize the number of successful service and product changes, a risk assessment must be done thoroughly, change authorization must be authorized, and schedule management must be managed.
Incident Management: By quickly returning the service to normal, we will minimize the adverse impact of incidents.
Problem Management: Identify and manage actual and potential causes of incidents and workarounds in order to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents.
Service Request Management: Provide an effective and user-friendly approach to all predefined, user-initiated service requests in order to maintain the agreed quality of service.
Service Desk: In order to capture the demand for incident resolution and service requests. As well as the sole point of contact and entry point for all users, it should serve as a service provider's single point of contact.
Service Level Management: The establishment of clear business-based service levels and the monitoring and management of the delivery of services against those levels are essential.
How to Pass ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam? ITIL Certification Path
To prepare for the ITIL exam, follow these three steps:
1. Learn more about ITIL Course:
It is advisable to take the ITIL course in advance if you are planning to go for ITIL 4 Foundation. The course can either be taken at an ATO or self-study. The ITIL Foundation Certification Training Course is not mandatory. It is important to take the ITIL training from a training provider, as this will help you understand the terms and tricks.
Furthermore, you will get guidance on how to prepare for the ITIL exam. You can always gain a better understanding of the ITIL life cycle from an instructor who has extensive experience. For this reason, many people enroll in ITIL courses.
2. ITIL Exam Preparations:
TIL Study Guides and other resources would have been provided by the training provider if you attended the Knowledgehut ITIL foundation certification training course. If you are studying on your own, create a study guide. Choose from among many available resources online, but make sure they are appropriate for the revised version of ITIL for the ITIL exam.
Create your key points by going through the study guide. Highlight the topics you need to go over again.
Consult your instructor for clarification if needed. Find out how the ITIL processes and functions relate to what you do now. Taking this approach will help you solidify concepts.
Do you have access to practice exams? If not, you can try free online tests. They will give you an idea of how you are doing.
Some institutions offer ITIL certifications directly after completion of the course. Before taking the exam, make sure you're prepared.
Once your scores consistently surpass the pass mark, schedule an ITIL exam.
Understanding the interrelationships between the 5 phases of ITIL is crucial for the ITIL Exam.
3. Learn about the five phases of the ITIL life cycle:
Based on the ITIL framework, there are five phases in the ITIL life cycle: Strategy, Design, Transition, Operations, and Continual Improvement.
Here are the 5 core areas or volumes of the ITIL Life cycle:
Service Strategy
The Service Strategy phase involves figuring out which services are critical, how funds will be allocated for the services, etc. The key is to create a business case based on market trends, priorities, funding, risks, etc. By defining a business case, you can tell customers how to make use of your service, and you will be able to understand your company's requirements and customers’ needs.
Service strategy consists of the following components:
Strategy Management: Provides you with which strategy to apply, how to implement it, the executives responsible, and improvements to align the strategy with customer expectations.
Service Portfolio Management: This process shows you how to get the most value with the least risk and cost. Therefore, optimizing and allocating resources is at the core of this process.
Financial Management: It helps you keep track of IT costs, budgets, and expenditures.
Demand Management: enables you to balance your capacity and the market's need. As a result of this process, you can understand the patterns of usage and plan accordingly which services are your core and supporting services.
Keeping the complete ITIL lifecycle in mind, the Service Design core volume will help you understand how to effectively utilize your resources. Design should be flexible to adapt to changing business needs. To make service available within the given resources, time, and constraints, you must reach a trade-off. The key to acing your ITIL exam is understanding these factors.
During the design phase of service, the following processes take place:
Design coordination: This process aims to assist in understanding how to coordinate all activities carried out to achieve the desired business objectives.
Service catalog management: Managing the catalog of services you offer and plan to offer as well as information about those services is part of this process.
Service-level management: This involves deciding how well the service will be provided, setting targets, monitoring performance, etc.
Availability management: Ensuring that services are available in accordance with current needs and predicting and planning for future needs.
Capacity management: What is the best cost-effective level of capacity?
IT service continuity management: When can services be reinstituted? What criteria should be followed?
Security management: Integrating IT security and business security to ensure a consistent operational environment.
Supplier management: Ensuring IT services are aligned with business needs in a cost-effective manner.
Service Transition
ITIL Exam candidates need to understand the 3rd phase of the ITIL Life cycle. Specifically, ITIL Service Transition includes the following steps:
Transition planning and support: Steps for ensuring the smooth transition of services.
Change management: How can changes be incorporated in a minimally disruptive manner?
Service asset and configuration management: The process of identifying, monitoring, and managing changes to Configuration Items (CI) and Service Assets.
Release and deployment management: The process of ensuring deployments go smoothly. This enables you to understand how to plan, build, test, and release applications into production.
Service validation and testing: Validation is the key step in ensuring the service meets the requirements related to design and strategy. Testing ensures any defects are caught before deployment.
Change evaluation: In this process, the proposed changes are evaluated based on their Return on Investment (ROI).
Knowledge management: Knowledge drives informed decisions in an organization. As a result, this process aims to pool knowledge and share it.
Service Operation
The customers or business users are in the process of evaluating the service and realizing whether it is worth it or not. During the Service Operation phase, whatever was done in the Service Transition phase will become reality. ITIL Exam candidates should be familiar with these processes that make up the service operation volume:
Access Management: What information or assets need to be accessed? How to limit access to only authorized personnel. How do assets remain secure, confidential, and intact? These topics are discussed during this process.
Problem Management: Manage the causes (problems) of incidents. Aims to find a solution to the problem.
Event Management: Managing all types of events throughout the lifecycle, which includes managing any changes in state.
Request Fulfilment: This process discusses how well you can handle IT service requests.
Incident Management: An incident occurs when IT services are interrupted without notice. As a result, in the process of managing incidents, you learn how to protect your business from harm.
Continual Service Improvement
All stages of the IT life cycle are covered by this core volume. In order to stay competitive, you need to continually improve your processes to be better, faster, and more cost-effective. Thus, you should be constantly looking for ways to improve your business. By using these guidelines, you can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IT services and reduce costs at the same time.
The following processes are part of Continual Service Improvement:
Service Review: In this process, best practices are discussed for evaluating potential improvements to the service. By using this method, you can also determine the most cost-effective method of delivering the service.
Process Evaluation: Does the process meet its objectives? Based on this, the benchmark needs to be revised. That is the lesson to be learned from this process.
Definition of CSI Initiatives: When you evaluate your process, you know where you need to improve. By taking part in this process, you can initiate projects/initiatives that will help you to improve.
Monitoring of CSI Initiatives: What are some ways to keep track of improvements made? Modifications are to be made as part of this process in order to reach the targets and make the desired results.
Top Cities where KnowledgeHut Conduct ITIL Certification Training Course Online
The following are some advantages of passing the ITIL exam:
Your ITIL Foundation certification has been earned.
Be recognized, respected, and appreciated by colleagues and senior staff.
More opportunities to advance up the ladder and a better chance of landing a career in ITSM.
After passing the ITIL Exam, you will get better pay, benefits, and promotions.
Unleash your potential with the top PMP certification and elevate your project management expertise. Begin your journey now!
What’s Next?
Before you can move on to the next level of the ITIL Exam, you must complete the previous level (ITIL Exam). Both Practitioners and Intermediates require an ITIL 4 Foundation credential.
Taking the ITIL Exam opens up numerous job opportunities and allows for a raise in salary as well as career advancement. What are you waiting for? Take the exam now! You can also learn about the best IT service management courses here.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is the pass mark for ITIL 4?
In order to earn the ITIL Foundation Certification, you need to clear the ITIL Exam. For this, you must score at least 65 percent by answering at least twenty-six questions correctly.
2. What happens if you fail the ITIL exam?
If you fail, you have two options: either buy a new exam voucher and retake the exam, or appeal for a fee-based re-evaluation of your answers if you took the exam through an ATO. Currently, this fee ranges from US $100 - US $150 and is refundable if you win. If you fail the appeal, in that case, you will lose the fee, and you will have to buy a new exam voucher.
Manikandan Mohanakrishnan
Consultant
Manikandan Mohanakrishnan is a highly skilled corporate trainer, consultant, and content developer with expertise in a wide range of areas including ITIL 4, PRINCE2, Agile/Scrum, PMP, DevOps, and soft skills. With a passion for delivering exceptional training experiences, Manikandan offers a comprehensive suite of training services covering service management, project management, business simulations, and more. With over 20+ years of experience, he has successfully facilitated numerous programs, including business communications, emotional intelligence, team building, and organizational change management. Manikandan's dedication to empowering individuals and organizations shines through his motivational talks and impactful training sessions.
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