How to progress from ServiceNow Administrator to Implementation Specialist

As most new ServiceNow administrators that I meet, I started with the 3 days “ServiceNow System Administration Training” ($2100), that you can pass with ServiceNow or one of its official certified training partners. As an alternative you may also consider this Udemy 7 hours online course “ServiceNow 101: Administration” as an economic alternative.

Now, how do you improve on your technical knowledge of the platform, and what steps could you apply to assert your experience?

After this introduction course, you’re expected to gain experience on the field, while administering your instance. Many administrators stop their curriculum here, but you many opportunities to improve. Let’s me present you some possible next steps…

After 3-6 months of experience, you may confirm that you’re no more a rookie by passing the “ServiceNow Certified System Administrator” certification.

This exam’s scope is mapped to the three days ServiceNow System Administration Training.

The 60 minutes’ exam contains 65 multiple‑choice questions and cost USD $150.

There are some nice tutorials on the Developer Portal. You can follow them to learn a few new tricks to add to your belt.

I plan to publish a dedicated article on the great online courses I found to learn and progress as a JavaScript developer. As for ServiceNow, if you need help to progress on the scripting and Javascript side, there is a 3 days “Scripting in ServiceNow” course ($2100). I did not take this one, so I invite other readers to post their feedback as comments.

After 12-36 months of experience, for Services Partner Implementation Specialists, or anyone who wants to follow a path to becoming an Implementation consultant, you may want to confirm that you’re an expert by passing the “ServiceNow Certified Implementation Specialist” certification.

The exams could be quite difficult because the scope is often wider than most admin encounter when they manage a single instance. You’ll need to be familiar with all scripting options, JavaScript, workflows, application security, Scrum for SDLC, LDAP integration, CMDB, web services, and many processes with their best practices… So, depending of your experience and the instances you managed, you may have to learn and experiment with a number features that you are not familiar with.

To prepare for this exam, most administrators register for a five days’ Implementation Bootcamp. The boot camp is not mandatory, and if you’re good at self-studies, you may skip it and aim directly for the exam, like I did in 2013.

The 90 minutes’ exam contains 65 multiple‑choice questions and cost USD $200. You can have a look at the exam blue print to check example questions and requirements.

For registered technical partners and ServiceNow’s employees, the “ServiceNow Learning Portal” provides some very nice interactive trainings who grant Technical Accreditations over more than a dozen subjects in the Services Enablement section. Those include Incident Management, Change Management, Project Portfolio Suite, Performance Analytics, Service Portal, Human Resource (HR) Management, Technical Best Practices… The quality of the training is sometime irregular, and configuring an Amazon AWS account is quite complicated, but the interactive implementation simulators (SPLI) you’ll get are great tools to learn new domains, and kept your knowledge up to date with the latest releases.

The Implementation Simulator consists of a series of project implementation components. Tasks that are part of each component will be presented to the learner within a dedicated ServiceNow instance. Once each task is completed and submitted, the task is automatically assessed for accuracy and completeness, which provides the learner immediate feedback on the work that was done.

The interactive trainings will take from 3 hours to 2 days each, and you only have to pay the few dollars required for the Amazon hosting.

After you complete the simulator and an online exam you’ll be granted a Technical Accreditation on a specific domain, valid for about two years.

If ServiceNow where to allow this outside of its Partner program, it would be a great boon for customer’s administrators.

I hope this article will help some of you to advance their career. Is there other courses or curriculum that you found useful?