ITIL Certification

I have recently become ITIL certified. It was an initiative my company had created to help better the IT processes internally. Interestingly it was a requirement that everyone takes the course but it was not a requirement that you pass. If you fail, there were no repercussions. Of course everyone in my group had already taken the course and passed and i was the last so failing would have been terribly embarrassing. The course itself is actually quite good. It provides some very useful concepts, most of which I already learned during my engineering degree and by picking up best practices around work places I've worked so far. What it did do was place definitive terms on all these ideas and place a formal structure around them. It's a course I would highly recommend to any medium to large business that concerns itself heavily with IT. The processes it teaches are tried and tested and well known to be one of the most effective methods of IT management, but rarely are they followed. This is due to a lack of cohesive structure in the most part and while most IT professionals may know of the processes, unless they are implemented they aren't much good and everyone will go about implementing bits and pieces of what they interpret as correct as they see fit. Having a corporate wide decision to follow the ITIL steps in a structured manner will definitely help most businesses manage their IT processes more effectively. It's an expensive process though, but if you're losing money due to inefficient IT processes and work flow, then I would say very much worth while. As for the certification itself, well I wasn't a fan. I found that the exam was testing your comprehension skills more than your knowledge of the ITIL theory. The questions were tricky and someone without excellent comprehension would definitely struggle. But I passed fairly easily, as did most people in the course. Funny enough, the ones that failed were not dull people. The were bright and either had a very difficult exam question set or just took the course lightly not caring of the result. A certification test should test your knowledge, not your interpretation of a question. Other than that, it was an excellent course that I would recommend to anyone in IT.