In today’s competitive job market, how do you stand out from the crowd for your dream job role? According to a popular job portal report, close to 52% of job postings require professional certifications such as PMP Certification Online, ITIL V4 Training And Certification, Prince2 Foundation Training, Six Sigma Green Belt Training And Certification, and more over traditional bachelor’s degrees. You may have come across various forums and discussion boards where professionals have this recurring question regarding two of the most important IT certifications in PMP / ITIL Expert, and which is more useful and valuable for their career.
Professionals have an inherent understanding that the PMP certification is useful only for project managers and ITIL is useful for only ITSM Certification Courses professionals. With such a limited view, it does not do justice to the usefulness of both certifications.
Depending upon where you are in your career, and where you want to be, you will have a clear picture to pick one over the other. Because most of us have time constraints, going for both certifications is not a feasible option. So which of the two certifications is useful and valuable for you? As a professional, you need to have a fair understanding of your career goals, organization strategies, mission, and vision. This will enable you to understand which certification will help you to take your career to the next level.
Organizational Objectives: Cost Containment / Revenue Generation:
The key aspect of choosing your certification should depend on what sort of strategy your organization uses to increase profit. Does it Cost Containment or Revenue Generation, and which of these two aspects does your business interested in pursuing? Many industry experts believe, that successful companies ensure they are better before being cheaper and look are creating new revenue than cutting costs in the beginning stages.
In such a scenario, the company will roll out new projects and put efforts towards generating new revenue than on projects and efforts that contain costs upfront. So, with this picture of Cost Containment and Revenue Generation, let us see how we can relate this to globally recognized certifications in ITIL and PMP.
Cost Containment with ITIL Perspective:
ITIL as a methodology covers a wide range of aspects of ITSM that primarily focuses on IT operations such as service desk processes and functions, process management, and ownership.
Even the number of job postings on popular job portals and social media discussions indicate top searches that relate to processes and operations. There are also searches for ITIL Intermediate Certifications that focus on incident, request, problem, and change management along with Operational Support Analysis and Service Operations being the two most popular Intermediate Exams taken by professionals across the globe. There are many job openings for professionals with ITIL Expert certification with the focus being more on Service Design and Service Strategy.
When enterprises focus more on IT operations, it clearly indicates to be more efficient which helps to reduce costs. Overall, ITIL helps the organization to be better at customer service interaction during CSI initiatives, which focuses on operations/transition but does not improve strategy or the design aspect. For instance, if you look at your CSI register, it will be either about making IT run better or making a new product/service. It is here where these programs find it difficult to quantify ‘soft costs, which do not create revenue, and is hard to measure the cost savings. However, it becomes clear how much the program cost to the company. On many occasions, the efforts that are not funded lead to an untimely end with just a host of “lessons learned” during its execution.
Revenue Generation from Project Management Perspective:
Project Management Certification Courses objective is more towards IT Strategy and Design and not more towards IT operations, which is in the case of ITSM efforts. If you are part of IT Strategy and design, the effort is to generate revenue and not just to cut costs. In a project manager’s job role, your experience is with a variety of IT products/services and not just back-end IT operations. This kind of experience is more useful if you are looking out for leadership opportunities in your organization.
A project manager will be more involved while rolling out a new product/service. Moreover, these are critical to the overall business strategy of the organization and are “high profile” as they are directly proportional to increased revenues and improved brand awareness in the market. Nevertheless, one has to understand that any major IT operations effort such as ITIL implementation is also a major “project” for the organization and may come with the project manager. Here an ITIL Expert will act as a Subject Matter Expert but business-critical decisions will be left to the project manager.
Exciting Career vs. Secure Career:
Being a project manager does not exclude you from the implementation of the ITIL framework / ITSM efforts in your organization including revenue generation projects. Whereas by being an ITSM professional, your focus is only on cost containment and that too within the ITSM space.
Now let us see about the job opportunities. In an organization, how many ITIL Experts do we need? On a few occasions, an enterprise may need close to half a dozen, but the real number is just one or two and at times none. However, an enterprise cannot do away with PMPs; there is a real need for project practitioners in the organization. Most of the senior management and leadership will be PMP certified, and there are a few ITIL Experts as well.
Moreover, the majority of ITIL Expert jobs are on a short-term contract basis. With PMP, you will be able to find long-term opportunities as a project manager. With ITIL Expert, you will be on a road trip, where you will be finding your next destination when you are still working on the current one. Some find this an exciting option, while for others this is a source of major concern. Both certifications are good in their own way. Both have all the necessary ingredients to give your career a boost and take it to the next level.
Break your Existing Ceiling:
As an ITIL Expert, the majority of the focus will revolve around the back-end processing of IT Operations and reducing the cost. The only drawback here is you may find it difficult to break into the senior management and leadership roles in your organization. In the case of PMP-certified professionals, they lead people with new projects, new functionalities, and new service offerings that will generate new revenue streams. This is in line with the company’s business objective and offers a great head start to reach higher echelons in your organization.
Also with ITIL Expert, that is as far as you go in that stream. Yes, there is ITIL Master Level certification, but there are hardly any job postings for that role. There are only close to 50 people in the entire world who are ITIL Master certified. With PMP, you will be able to achieve Program Management Professional (PgMP)® certification. Both ITIL Expert and PMP will break your existing ceiling barrier and improve your earning potential.
The only difference is that with PMP certification there is a number of specializations that you can opt for. One such form is Agile Project Management. There are many globally recognized certifications such as Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® and ScrumMaster (CSM). With the widespread acceptance of Agile Certification Courses and DevOps Certification Courses concepts across the globe, there are more job opportunities with PMP certification with a higher salary bracket.
Both PMP and ITIL Expert offers tremendous value and knowledge at the same time. Nevertheless, PMP is slightly ahead with its universal application of best practices in project management, which has a higher demand in the current context of new revenue generation by enterprises across the globe. But if you love IT Operations and process improvement then taking the ITIL Expert journey is a great way to expand the scope of your career.
