ISO/IEC 20000

ISO/IEC 20000-1 is the international standard that sets out the requirements for a service management system. The current edition is ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018, extended in 2024 by Amendment 1, which introduced the climate action changes applied across the ISO management system standards. One point is worth making before anything else, because it decides which of the products below is right for you: the standard certifies organisations, not people. What an individual certification attests is that you understand the standard well enough to work with it — to help implement the system, to run it, or to audit it.

That is also what separates the levels. Foundation covers the concepts and the structure of the requirements, and is where anyone working in or around a service management system starts. Practitioner is about applying the requirements to a real system rather than recognising them. Auditor and Lead Auditor are a different discipline again: not how to build the system, but how to gather evidence that it does what it claims. Below you will find courses with the exam included, standalone mock exams, and courseware, under two different schemes — APMG and GoToCertify. They lead to different exam formats, so it is worth checking the exam details on the product page before you buy.