PMP or ITIL certification? Advantages, Benefits, Pros and Cons

Both the PMP (Project Management Professional) and ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) are popular certification choices. Each one capable of landing you a top job with a very high salary.

With more and more organisations looking to save money and cut expenditure, project management is becoming a hot topic. These days, most organisations are willing to pay through the nose to get their projects delivered on time and on budget. Late projects cost more and hurt consumer confidence.

This is where a certification can set you apart from the rest of the crowd. By validating your skills and gaining a recognised certification, you can stand head and shoulders above the competition.

However, before you rush off and get that PMP or ITIL certification, have you considered the differences and benefits of each?

Let's take a look at PMP first:

PMP

PMP is the Project Management Professional certification. And it's just that, it's a certification. It's offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI) who are a not-for-profit organisation responsible for advancing the project management profession. Since they're not-for-profit, they have no financial motivation tied to the certification

The PMP certification was originally launched back in 1984 and they're over 400,000 people who've gained the PMP certification to date. Like the ITIL certification, you must top up your certification every couple of years to stay certified. This consists of taking classes, attending meetings and contributing to research papers.

The PMP certification, unlike ITIL, is focused on project management as a general subject. It's NOT focused on IT practises but instead addresses projects as a complete and linear process. For example, you'll learn about initiating the project, planning, executing and finally closing the project (questions are taken from the PMBOK guide).

PMP Wikipedia

ITIL

ITIL stands for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It's an enterprise framework that any organisation can tailor to suit their business model. ITIL provides a complete set of checklists, tasks and procedures for enterprise IT management.

Back in the 1980's the UK government developed a set of recommendations for its dependence on IT. Originally only a handful of books, ITIL quickly grew to well over 30 volumes. The current version of ITIL is V3 (soon to be replaced) and was published back in 2007. It covers the following IT management areas; Service Strategy; Service Design; Service Transition; Service Operation; Continual Service Improvement.

Even though ITIL is focused solely on IT management, it's considerably larger than the PMP certification. IT managers, support staff and even developers can profit from learning about the ITIL framework.

ITIL Wikipedia

PMP or ITIL

So, we've given an overview of both PMP and ITIL. Now let's take a look at some of the reasons for choosing one over the other.

PMP

Advantages

It's a generalised project management certification
It's very popular in the United States, Asia, India and Saudi Arabia with most project management jobs asking for PMP
It can be used to address project management for a variety of industries
It's an affordable certification
It's just one exam

Disadvantages