Axelos Exam statistics 2014 – Don’t Panic - Yet

Effective January 1^st 2014, there was a fairly high increase in Exam prices announced by Axelos, the new ac-creditor and owner of the ITIL and Prince2 Portfolio. Some regions were more affected more severely. It was expected by many that the number of ITIL / Prince2 certifications, would fall considerably. Consequently many professionals in the IT Service Management sphere have been looking forward to the release of the official Axelos Exam data.

Last week, Axelos released the long awaited details of the exam consumed in 2014, for ITIL and the Prince2/PPM portfolio. Axelos choose to release the numbers for the period H1 (Half-Year 2014) and then correlated the numbers with H1 of 2013, so that the following report appeared:

Product	H1 2013	H2 2014	Variation
ITIL Exam #	160422	142651	11%
Prince2 /PPM Exam #	90162	91034	1%
Grand Total	250584	233685	7%

On first appearance, the report spelled doom for the ATO and training community which relied very heavily on ITIL training and certification as a product offering. The internet and blogs were full of doomsday scenarios from about the 13^th of September.

 

When people look at the picture alongside, usually there are two possibilities, one that the glass is half full, while the other is that the glass is half-empty. The positive and the negative, the hopeful and the fearful. However to some it also represents a scenario, that whatever way you look at the glass, you don’t have the full story, its only 50% of the story.

If we break the report into two parts ITIL and Prince2, we get two pieces of information, the ITIL numbers have gone down, while the Prince2 numbers have gone up slightly. So part of the story is good, instead of having a completely bad story.

Another story which does not come up from the huge data available to us is the fact that towards the end of 2013, when it became apparent that the exam rates were going up, a lot of prospective students decided to pre-pone their training and certification to take advantage of the then perceived reduced prices. So a lot of ATO’s and training providers were very active in the last quarter of 2013. The following data reflects the training business for ITIL in Q4 over the years:

ITIL Foundation for Fourth Quarter					ITIL Intermediate for Fourth Quarter
Year	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total	Year	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
2010	21445	24070	26114	71629	2010	3040	3430	3515	9985
2011	23055	24994	24948	72997	2011	4570	5385	5468	15423
2012	25189	23900	22838	71927	2012	5836	6427	5066	17329
2013	24768	25226	28292	78286	2013	7003	7290	9279	23572

From the above, we see that the ITIL Foundations exams numbers between 2010 to 2012 were almost flat, but in 2013 they spiked, especially in Dec 2013, when the exams numbers were probably 4000-5000 more than what they should have been. From the same set of data above, the ITIL intermediate exam numbers are more difficult to extrapolate, as 2010 was the year when the impact of V2-V3 updation was beginning to be felt and hence year 2010 as a base year is not a good reference. However we can see a huge spike in Dec 2013 for ITIL intermediate exams, leaving us to believe that about 4000 ITIL Intermediate exams extra were taken in that month, above the normal which one could have expected. Combined, the ITIL Foundation and intermediate numbers were about 8-10,000 more than what have happened normally, which would to a great extent explain for the shortfall in H1 2014 numbers over H1 2013.

The long term conclusion is of course difficult to predict, however it is not the end of the road for training providers, and that there is still a huge requirement for training and certification, and those who provide value to their customers will always have a bright future.