ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam Tips
Important note: This guide is about the ITIL 4 Foundation exam. If you’re a candidate for the ITIL 3 Foundation exam, read the ITIL 3 Foundation Exam Tips guide instead.
This guide is designed for candidates who have finished the ITIL 4 Foundation eLearning Course, and are preparing to take its Exam Simulator.
Common Risks
Over the years we’ve seen three major reasons why people do fail this exam. The first two reasons you might expect, the third may be a surprise, and something you should be aware of.
- Not learning the material. Pretty obviously you do need to pay attention and remember things. Some of the questions are memory based, names of sub-processes, types of metrics etc. So a combination of memory and understanding is needed to get you through.
- Panic, carelessness or stress. It may have been a few years since you did an exam and it can feel stressful and intimidating when it just you faced with 40 questions. That’s why we suggest you use at least one sample paper as practice of both exam questions and exam conditions. When feeling stressed it is more likely your brain will misread or misunderstand things. So keep calm, read carefully and read fully.
- Being experienced and knowledgeable. This is a foundation exam, offering an introductory view of IT Service Management. Therefore the questions are simple and straightforward. In complicated real-life ITSM things are not so simple. Often candidates with experience of aspects of ITSM in that complicated real world look for ‘tricks’ in the questions. There are no trick questions. Do not tell yourself “It can’t be that obvious” because it usually is that obvious in ITIL Foundation questions.
Exam Areas
The following are the categories of questions for the exam, which you should be familiar with:
- Key concepts of service management
- Guiding principles
- The four dimensions of service management
- Purpose and components of service value system
- Activities of service value chain
- Purpose and key terms in practices
- Details of the main practices