I did some ITIL Training
My work invests quite well in training for us, and although I mostly ignore it as I've got the skills to do my day job and don't want to do training just for the sake of it.
However, when some ITIL Foundation training* came up I thought it was worth investing. It's really aimed more at managers, but I talk to people who are immersed in it on a regular basis, and I reckon it will look very good on my CV when I'm looking for a new job in a few years**.
At that point Sophia was home the whole time, so I agreed with Jane that she'd take on sole parenting for the three days of the course. And then, thankfully, the nurseries opened up again just in time! So I got to spend three days on an online training course, while a trainer talked us through around 150 slides worth of information, multiple quizzes, and two past papers. Which, I have to say, they handled well. I felt it could have been compressed a bit more, but then it would have left behind some people who haven't spent as much time around it. And while my preferred method of learning is to "throw a ton of information at my brain and then try and do something with it" (in this case, sample papers), that doesn't work that well for everyone.
In the end, I got 93% in the exam. Which I finished in 15 minutes of the hour allowed. As I'd taken nearer 30 minutes for the two sample papers, and scored 85-ish% for them, I can only assume I got lucky with the actual exam***.
Now I can go back to doing some actual work for a few days until Thor turns up...
* ITIL, for those of you lucky enough not to know, is a set of best practices and terminology that allow people running a service organisation to work and communicate effectively. Basically trying to make sure that when people talk to each other how different parts of a large business provide services to each other (or to customers) that they're speaking the same language, and using the same concepts. More here.
**My current employers are planning on outsourcing their administration systems to a third party, a process which is estimated around three years. At the end of that they won't need most of my department any more. I don't want to talk about that in detail in a public post. Feel free to chat to me more privately if you like :-)
***Everyone gets a different exam - with questions selected randomly from a bank of them, assuring that there are a set number from various parts of the course, but no ability to simply rote learn from a stolen copy of th exam. Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
However, when some ITIL Foundation training* came up I thought it was worth investing. It's really aimed more at managers, but I talk to people who are immersed in it on a regular basis, and I reckon it will look very good on my CV when I'm looking for a new job in a few years**.
At that point Sophia was home the whole time, so I agreed with Jane that she'd take on sole parenting for the three days of the course. And then, thankfully, the nurseries opened up again just in time! So I got to spend three days on an online training course, while a trainer talked us through around 150 slides worth of information, multiple quizzes, and two past papers. Which, I have to say, they handled well. I felt it could have been compressed a bit more, but then it would have left behind some people who haven't spent as much time around it. And while my preferred method of learning is to "throw a ton of information at my brain and then try and do something with it" (in this case, sample papers), that doesn't work that well for everyone.
In the end, I got 93% in the exam. Which I finished in 15 minutes of the hour allowed. As I'd taken nearer 30 minutes for the two sample papers, and scored 85-ish% for them, I can only assume I got lucky with the actual exam***.
Now I can go back to doing some actual work for a few days until Thor turns up...
* ITIL, for those of you lucky enough not to know, is a set of best practices and terminology that allow people running a service organisation to work and communicate effectively. Basically trying to make sure that when people talk to each other how different parts of a large business provide services to each other (or to customers) that they're speaking the same language, and using the same concepts. More here.
**My current employers are planning on outsourcing their administration systems to a third party, a process which is estimated around three years. At the end of that they won't need most of my department any more. I don't want to talk about that in detail in a public post. Feel free to chat to me more privately if you like :-)
***Everyone gets a different exam - with questions selected randomly from a bank of them, assuring that there are a set number from various parts of the course, but no ability to simply rote learn from a stolen copy of th exam. Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.