ITIL Changed My Life. I Wasn’t Expecting It To.

# Career Success

# ITIL

# Leadership Insights

How ITIL turned a career transition into a journey of learning, growth and professional purpose.

September 15, 2026

Paul Farrow

ITIL Changed My Life. I Wasn’t Expecting It To.

Saying that ITIL changed my life sounds faintly ridiculous.

It is a framework for managing digital products and services, not a religious awakening. There was no mountaintop revelation, no blinding light, and no mysterious voice telling me to go forth and establish better incident management. And yet, looking back over the last four years, I am not sure there is a more accurate way to describe what happened.

This week, I became an ITIL Version 5 Master. The title matters to me, but probably not for the obvious reason. It feels less like reaching the top of a certification pathway and more like being given a reason to look backwards.

Roughly 51 months ago, ITIL was simply one of several qualifications I was taking while trying to work out what came next. At the time, I thought my future might be in project management or continuous improvement. I had taken PRINCE2, ITIL Foundation and Lean Six Sigma in fairly quick succession, and if you had asked me which of those would most shape my career, I doubt I would have chosen ITIL.

But service management was where the touchpaper was lit.

Looking back, I think ITIL changed three things for me. It gave me a language for things I already partly understood; it gave me a recognisable professional signal while I was translating substantial prior experience into a new field; and, over time, it became an organising framework against which I could test what I was learning in practice.

None of those things, individually, would have been enough. Together, they changed the direction of travel.

I thought I knew where I was going

In 2022, I was not starting from scratch.

I had spent around 15 years building expertise in another industry and had learned a great deal about customers, operations, systems, processes and the compromises organisations make when real life collides with how things were designed to work.

I had also reached a point where I felt professionally bottlenecked. I wanted to make myself more marketable, certainly, but I also wanted to understand more. I was looking for concepts, models and tools that would help me make sense of what I had learned through experience and carry that experience into a different professional context.

My first instinct was that project management might be the answer. PRINCE2 appealed because projects had shape: beginnings, endings, outputs, governance and visible progress. Lean Six Sigma appealed for a different reason. It offered a way to understand systems, identify waste, measure what was happening and improve it.

I could see a plausible future in either of those spaces.

ITIL initially felt like another useful part of the toolkit. I did not finish Foundation believing I had discovered my professional destiny. But something about service management kept drawing me back.

The appeal was not incident records, change schedules or service level agreements in isolation. It was that service management seemed to sit at the intersection of almost everything I was already interested in: people, process, technology, customers, suppliers, risk, organisational design, experience, improvement and value.

PRINCE2 helped me think about how to deliver change successfully. Lean Six Sigma helped me think about how to understand and improve systems and processes. ITIL asked a broader question: how do all these things work together, continuously, to create something useful for somebody?

That was a question I could imagine spending a career trying to answer.

Finding the language

One of the strange things about learning a professional framework after years in the workplace is that some concepts feel new while others feel oddly familiar.

ITIL gave names and structure to things I had encountered before but had not necessarily been able to articulate. It helped me think more clearly about the difference between outputs and outcomes, about why technically healthy systems can still provide poor services, and about the ways organisational hand-offs can create friction that is invisible to the teams involved but painfully obvious to the customer.

It also helped me recognise an idea that has become increasingly important to me: customers experience services end to end, while organisations tend to manage them in pieces.

A supplier can meet its target while the user is still unhappy. A team can optimise its own process while making the wider service worse. A project can deliver its stated output without materially improving the outcome it was intended to support.

Those were not entirely new observations, but ITIL gave me a way to discuss them with other people. It turned instincts into concepts and concepts into a shared professional language.

That mattered professionally too.

Career changes are often described as exercises in acquiring entirely new capability. My experience was more nuanced. I was not starting again. I was moving from having one foot in the profession to having both feet in it, and learning how to translate existing experience into the language, concepts and expectations of a new field.

That distinction mattered. It helped me recognise that the years before IT service management had not been a detour. They were part of the preparation.

A qualification cannot lead a team, navigate a difficult supplier conversation, make a judgement under uncertainty or explain an uncomfortable risk to a senior leader. Experience, relationships, judgement, timing and opportunity all matter far more than a digital badge.

But certifications can act as useful signals.

For someone moving between roles or professions, they can show that the transition is deliberate and that the person has begun to learn the language and expectations of the field they are entering.

For me, ITIL Foundation provided some of that credibility. It helped me through a door into full-time technology and service management.

Once through the door, the certificate became much less important. The work had to do the talking.

That was also where my relationship with ITIL began to change. At first, the framework helped me understand the work. As my experience grew, the work started helping me understand the framework.

When the textbook meets Tuesday morning

One of the clearest ways I can see how far my professional world has changed is to compare what happens when something goes badly wrong.

In my current role, a major incident can bring together experienced service management professionals, technical specialists and multiple suppliers across a Service Integration and Management (SIAM) environment. There are defined roles, established escalation routes, communications, triage and a shared understanding of how the response should operate. The incident itself may still be messy, stressful and technically ambiguous, but the organisation does not have to invent its response while simultaneously trying to restore the service.

That feels very different from some of my earlier experience.

Years ago, when a system failed, the response could feel a little like the Three Musketeers had been summoned. Three capable people would gather around the problem and work through it using experience, intuition and best endeavours. We would triage the issue, investigate possible causes, test assumptions and try to restore normality, while also effectively running the incident process ourselves.

We were often doing sensible things. We simply did not have a mature service management system surrounding us.

Change worked in much the same way. There was no formal change enablement practice and little of the structured assurance I now take for granted. A few people would review a proposed change, challenge anything that looked concerning and make the best judgement available to us. Sometimes the remaining weaknesses only became visible once the change reached production.

With hindsight, it was a slightly Wild West form of IT, although that description should not be confused with incompetence. Quite the opposite. I remain impressed by what capable people could achieve through trust, accumulated knowledge and sheer familiarity with the environment.

The weakness was that too much resilience lived inside particular individuals.

Heroics are seductive because they are visible. The person who joins the call, identifies the obscure dependency and saves the service at the eleventh hour is memorable. Organisations celebrate those moments, sometimes quite rightly.

Repeated heroics, though, usually tell us something about the system.

A resilient service should not require the right person to be awake, available and able to remember something nobody thought to document. It should not depend on somebody knowing whom to telephone because the formal route does not work. Restoration should not rely on a handful of individuals improvising the operating model in real time.

Good service management creates conditions in which expertise and judgement can be applied consistently. Roles should already be understood. Information should move through known channels. Suppliers should know how to collaborate. Decisions should have somewhere to go. Knowledge should survive the departure or absence of the person who originally acquired it.

In that sense, maturity is partly about moving resilience out of heroic individuals and into the system.

That does not make major incidents easy. It does not eliminate uncertainty or the need for talented people. It means that, when pressure arrives, those people can concentrate on understanding and solving the problem rather than simultaneously inventing the machinery needed to coordinate the response.

Looking back, I can now recognise fragments of formal service management in much of what we were doing years ago. We had independently recreated parts of incident management, problem investigation, change assessment and operational assurance because the underlying needs existed whether or not we knew the terminology.

ITIL helped me understand why some of those approaches worked, where they were fragile, and how organisations can deliberately build something more repeatable around them.

The system, ultimately, has to be capable of saving us.

I came to see the same pattern elsewhere. Value streams, supplier management, customer experience and governance all became less abstract once I could compare the framework with the reality around me.

The framework remained useful, but increasingly as a way of examining what was happening around me rather than as a set of instructions to follow.

That is probably one of the most important changes in how I now think about professional frameworks. Their value is not that reality neatly conforms to them. Their value is that they give us a common structure for understanding why reality so often does not.

What 87 credentials taught me about credentials

Since taking ITIL Foundation, my appetite for professional learning has become, depending on your point of view, either commendable or mildly excessive.

My LinkedIn profile currently lists 87 certifications, micro-credentials and designations acquired since mid-2022. That is a large number, and one that probably reflects my curiosity more than any perfectly coherent development plan.

They span project management, Lean, Agile, DevOps, governance, risk, cyber security, artificial intelligence, data, ethics and a collection of adjacent subjects that seemed worth exploring.

Seen as a list, it can look like badge collecting. I am conscious of that, and I would be pretending if I said there was no satisfaction in completing a qualification and adding it to the collection.

But the value, for me, has been in using different frameworks to interrogate many of the same underlying problems from different angles.

Service management has become one of the principal organising structures around which the rest of that learning sits. Project management helps me understand structured change. Lean and value stream thinking help me understand flow and improvement. DevOps helps me understand the relationship between development, delivery and operations. Governance frameworks help me think about direction, accountability and control. Risk disciplines help me think about uncertainty and consequence. Cyber security changes the boundaries within which services can operate, while artificial intelligence is challenging assumptions about how digital services are designed, consumed, supported and governed.

The subjects are broad because digital organisations are broad.

Over time, I have realised that what I have really been trying to build is a more complete mental model of how organisations, technology and people interact.

That has also made me more cautious about what a certification proves.

Professional qualifications are attractive because progress is easy to measure. There is a syllabus, an exam, a pass mark and usually a badge at the end.

Expertise is far less cooperative.

You can know the terminology and still misunderstand the system. You can memorise a framework and apply it badly. You can pass an exam and still lack the judgement needed to know when a textbook answer is inappropriate.

I have worked with highly capable people who hold comparatively few formal certifications, and with people carrying substantial lists of qualifications who are not necessarily stronger practitioners as a result.

At its best, a qualification provides scaffolding. It introduces concepts, gives structure to learning and offers a shared vocabulary. Experience provides the context that tells you when those concepts are useful, where they break down and what happens when several competing principles are all simultaneously true.

Qualification gives you vocabulary. Experience gives you context. Reflection gradually turns them into judgement.

That final step is probably the most important part of professional development, and the hardest to examine.

Becoming a Master

Which brings me back to this week.

I sat the ITIL Transformation exam and then, 48 hours later, the Managing Professional Transition exam. It was probably not the revision schedule I would recommend to anyone trying to optimise their chances of success.

Life continued in between.

Part of the afternoon before the second exam involved taking two small boys to Tesco, one dressed as Spider-Man and the other as an Ender Dragon from Minecraft.

There was no heroic revision montage. There was a supermarket, a Minecraft costume, a superhero and an entirely ordinary family afternoon.

A few hours later, I sat an exam and completed my transition to ITIL Version 5 Master.

It felt slightly surreal.

The interesting thing is that I do not feel as though I have mastered service management. If anything, four years of doing the work has made me less comfortable with the idea that complex services can ever really be mastered.

Every new responsibility exposes another layer of complexity. There are more variables, more stakeholders, more constraints and more perspectives than any framework can fully capture.

So I see Master less as a declaration of completion and more as a marker. It is an opportunity to look back at a journey that started with a Foundation course and ask what actually changed.

Did ITIL change my life?

On balance, I think it did, although not in the simplistic sense that a qualification produced a career.

People opened doors for me. Managers took chances. Colleagues taught me things. Teams trusted me with responsibility. Experience exposed weaknesses in my thinking, and mistakes taught lessons that no syllabus could have provided. Curiosity did a great deal of the rest.

ITIL's contribution was more specific. It gave structure to experience I already had, helped me cross a professional boundary, and then became something I could test against increasingly complex work.

In 2022, I thought project management or continuous improvement might define the next stage of my career. Instead, service management became the field in which everything seemed to connect: systems, people, technology, suppliers, experience, risk and improvement.

Fifty-one months ago, ITIL was one of several qualifications I was taking because I was not entirely sure what came next. This week, that journey reached the milestone of ITIL Version 5 Master.

The designation means a great deal to me.

But the more meaningful part is everything that happened in between.

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