SQL and ITIL Query

The_Hurricane

The recruitment agency have asked me to get ITIL certified.

andrewjf

The_Hurricane wrote: »

The recruitment agency have asked me to get ITIL certified.

How will that help unless you've applied this in a job and gained some real experience?
As an interviewer I can assure you I'd be looking for some evidence of practical experience. Paper qualifications are ok, but there's no substitute for hands on.

duggan1

andrewjf wrote: »

How will that help unless you've applied this in a job and gained some real experience?
As an interviewer I can assure you I'd be looking for some evidence of practical experience. Paper qualifications are ok, but there's no substitute for hands on.

It will help get past the vetting stage as more and more employers are considering ITIL Foundation v3 to be an essential qualification.

andrewjf

duggan1 wrote: »

It will help get past the vetting stage as more and more employers are considering ITIL Foundation v3 to be an essential qualification.

I still think it's pointless and a waste of time at this stage, as any knowledgeable interviewer would know in an instant that he doesn't have the experience to back it up.
Paper qualifications are fine, but only to add weight to your knowledge gained professionally.
Besides, won't the 'vetting' phase consist of looking at what's on his CV? My first read of a CV includes looking at what roles and responsibilities someone had, related the skills area I'm interested in. Unless he lies, then there's not going to be much evidence of that.

duggan1

andrewjf wrote: »

I still think it's pointless and a waste of time at this stage, as any knowledgeable interviewer would know in an instant that he doesn't have the experience to back it up.
Paper qualifications are fine, but only to add weight to your knowledge gained professionally.
Besides, won't the 'vetting' phase consist of looking at what's on his CV? My first read of a CV includes looking at what roles and responsibilities someone had, related the skills area I'm interested in. Unless he lies, then there's not going to be much evidence of that.

The problem might be that employers don't even want to read any CV from someone that doesn't already have ITIL Foundation. Especially a problem when going for jobs via agencies.

I'm not disagreeing that it is pointless, simply saying that for roles within a support environment at least, it is becoming a qualification that employers expect to see.

albionrovers

Ask the agent why they insist on ITIL. Does their client insist on it?

If they just want it for their own standards without any feedback from the employer (eg. local council, who won't ask for it) then it's pointless getting it up-front.

John_Jizzle

have worked in IT (SQL) since uni (9 years ago). I've never heard of ITIL or heard anyone mention it

robrooo

John_Jizzle wrote: »

have worked in IT (SQL) since uni (9 years ago). I've never heard of ITIL or heard anyone mention it

Yeah - I've worked in IT for 20 years and have never heard of it either, but then I have only worked in commercial organisations - ITIL seems to have originated from the government, so maybe used in civil service systems?

Edit - the ITIL website cites users as NHS, NASA and Disney

andrewjf

In 1989 I'd never heard of HTML, but that's now in pretty common use :-)

RobTang

John_Jizzle wrote: »

have worked in IT (SQL) since uni (9 years ago). I've never heard of ITIL or heard anyone mention it

cause its not really for developers SQL and ITIL are not 2 skills you would normally expect to see on a CV.

ITIL is basically best practice for service delivery; its not a product as such. There *may* be some cross over as these guys would be provisioning and maintaining your SQL servers and it snot unknown for support to run ad-hoc queries in some cases...