Imagine as an IT professional you are looking for a way to earn some ITIL qualifications. The decision is made and you start to investigate what is available and to what level you will study.
You quickly identify that you need to start with the ITIL Foundation course and then you can go on to further studies at the Intermediate level, with an ultimate goal to become an ITIL expert.
Now the challenge is, where are you going to go to take the necessary courses. You search the web and you are presented with a variety of options. Classroom, online, self study.
You need to invest wisely and one thing you quickly recognize is that some companies promote accredited courses and some don't. You quickly determine that accredited trainers, following strict guidelines designed to maximise your training experience, have prepared these accredited courses.
Now you look at your personal situation. You have limited funds and/or you are not living in a city that offers any local courses (or not any in the timeframes that you are wanting). This leads you to the conclusion that you will pursue your ITIL qualifications using an online medium.
While this may sound like a complex set of choices to have to go through let's analyse what you have just saved yourself in time and money.
To attend a classroom course, you need to spend at least 1 to 2 hours to identify a company, make contact, negotiate price, make the booking and to make any necessary pre-course payments (note these times are not necessarily solid blocks of time). Now you need to look at the logistics and cost of where your course is. You need to find a flight that gets you to the location the day prior to the course and you need to make hotel reservations and either hire care arrangements or you may just use taxis. This is another 1 to 2 hours gone.
So now you will lose the best part of a day travelling to the course before it starts, you suffer the ride to and from the airport, the security checks and the airline food. You quickly find that while the classroom course offers you a good chance at instructor interaction you are constantly troubled by issues that are happening back at the office. You have to travel to the course each day, you have to take breaks when the instructor determines it, lunch is too long and you simply just want to get through the course.
The alternative is to select an online study program. You opt for a video based instructor to give you that sense of interaction with your trainer. It is so much easier to arrange and it saves you money, but importantly it saves you time. You pay for your course, you have access for a determined amount of time, you study when it suits you, take breaks at your discretion AND you still have access to a support forum and experts if you come across a tricky topic.
Roger Purdie is an ITIL Expert and prolific trainer in countries such as Taiwan, Mongolia and South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Roger has also delivered ITIL training and consulting in Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Egypt, Zambia, South Africa, Mexico, Afghanistan and Russia. Roger is behind the ITIL Video based and blended learning web site itilonlinetraining.net
