For the first part of my career (about 20 years), I did not own it; I let it happen to me. My journey into the ServiceNow ecosystem was haphazard. I’ll share more specifics in another post. I want to concentrate here on what I might consider if I’m looking for a career change that includes being involved with ServiceNow. Here we go.

It’s good to come to the table with both ServiceNow and domain experience. When I say domain experience, are you:

• Familiar with project management, sales, or marketing?
• Have your worked in Enterprise Risk Management, Vendor Management, Human Resources, Knowledge Management, IT Service Management or other discipline but haven’t used ServiceNow to enable those?
• Have a public trust or security clearance?

When you have demonstrated domain experiences, there’s a chance that you would be a good candidate for working for ServiceNow as long as you’re committed to learning the platform.

What if you want to start learning on your own? Start by going to the ServiceNow Developer Site, and register for a new account:

• Click on Sign In.
• If you don’t already have an account, click on create a new account.

Do not fear that this is a developer site. Every ServiceNow engagement involves configuration but you don’t need to have developer skills. Now that you have an account, create your own instance of the platform. While you won’t be able to use that instance for anything production, you will have a sandbox for getting familiar with the tool. You don’t know this yet but you’ve now opened yourself up to a bevy of tools that are available to you for free from the platform.

Interested in getting certified? You don’t have to rely on CourseEra or Udemy. At the time of writing this, all on-demand training with ServiceNow is free. There is equivalent in person training; but that same material is presented to you for self-paced learning. There will be a fee associated with most certification exams. However, I repeat, on demand training is free. Here a few recommended training courses and paths:

• Welcome to ServiceNow
• Certified Systems Administrator

There is also a thriving Community of ServiceNow professionals that you can avail yourself of the ServiceNow community

This is just a short primer and there are so many things that you can enable with ServiceNow. I welcome you to the journey and you can feel free to reach out to me. And, remember: on-demand training is free.