If you are entry-level or have a couple of years of IT experience, you can expect to be hired as a process coordinator. A process coordinator ensures that the administrative activities in a process are carried out as designed. Incident coordinator, change coordinator and configuration analyst are some of the coordinator roles available in ITIL-based IT service management.
At a mid-management level, with a minimum of eight years of experience, you may be asked to manage processes end to end. You will have coordinators reporting to you, and you would be accountable for ensuring that activities in service management are compliant to the processes. Problem manager, release manager and service desk manager are some of the managerial roles.
If you want to get into an ITIL consulting role, you need to be wired a different way. You should be someone who automatically notices inconsistencies in processes and thinks about optimization. Let’s take a non-IT scenario for example. In a restaurant, a hostess seats you. A waiter takes the order. A food runner transports food, and the busser clears the table. None of these roles can be done in isolation. When you visit a restaurant, do you observe this process? Do you notice changes and think about what works, what doesn’t? If you see and think in this manner, you could very well excel in a process consultant/process developer role. Process consultants typically have an excess of 10 years of experience and love to dig their hands deep into all activities, inside ITIL and out. It is a highly respectable job in the industry, but you have to love documenting processes and creating flow charts.
Last but not the least, you could be an ITIL trainer. With ITIL in huge demand by employers, many job seekers are going the ITIL way. If you want to be a trainer, study every ITIL process in detail. An ITIL trainer will need to put on the hat of an academic to better train students on the art of ITIL.