Training, exams and certification
Training, exams and certification
Forty questions in an hour, closed book, twenty-six to pass. It is a short exam with a high bar: 65% leaves room for fourteen mistakes, and most of the questions live in one clause.
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The APMG ISO/IEC 20000 Foundation certificate checks that you know what ISO/IEC 20000-1 requires of a service management system (SMS) and how the requirements fit together. It does not ask you to design one.
| Questions | 40, multiple choice, one correct answer each |
|---|---|
| Duration | 60 minutes |
| Pass mark | 65% — 26 correct answers out of 40 |
| Materials | Closed book |
| Standard | ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 |
| Prerequisites | None |
| Languages | English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish |
| Validity | No expiry date is set by APMG |
| Typical course | Two days |
Sixty minutes for forty questions is ninety seconds each. That is enough to read every option twice, but not enough to reconstruct the standard from first principles: you either know where a requirement lives or you do not.
The pass mark is the part people underestimate. APMG’s ISO/IEC 27001 Foundation passes at 50%; ISO/IEC 20000 Foundation asks for 65%. Fourteen wrong answers is the whole margin.
The 2018 edition follows the common structure of ISO management system standards: clauses 4 to 7 (context, leadership, planning, support), clause 9 (performance evaluation) and clause 10 (improvement) read much like any other management system standard. What makes ISO/IEC 20000-1 different is clause 8, Operation of the SMS, with six groups of processes:
| 8.2 Service portfolio | Service delivery, planning the services, control of other parties, service catalogue, asset and configuration management |
|---|---|
| 8.3 Relationship and agreement | Business relationship, service level and supplier management |
| 8.4 Supply and demand | Budgeting and accounting, demand and capacity management |
| 8.5 Service design, build and transition | Change management, service design and transition, release and deployment |
| 8.6 Resolution and fulfilment | Incident, service request and problem management |
| 8.7 Service assurance | Availability, continuity and information security management |
Knowing which group a process sits in is a recurring kind of question — capacity under supply and demand, availability under service assurance — and so is the difference between neighbouring processes, such as incident and problem, or incident and service request.
Most candidates arrive from ITIL. That helps with the vocabulary and hurts with the logic: ITIL describes good practice, ISO/IEC 20000-1 states auditable requirements. When an option sounds like sensible advice but is not something the standard requires, it is usually the wrong answer.
The same goes for other parties. An organization can use suppliers for any part of the service lifecycle, but it keeps accountability and must control their involvement. Answers that “exclude” an outsourced process, or require the supplier to be certified, are traps.
Learn the clause map first, then the six process groups of clause 8, then the definitions. Practise with timed sets of forty: the pace matters as much as the content. If you can place any requirement in its clause without looking, you are ready.
Forty multiple-choice questions, one correct answer each.
Twenty-six out of forty — 65%.
Sixty minutes, closed book.
ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018, the current edition of the requirements.
No. There are no prerequisites, although ITIL Foundation makes the vocabulary familiar.
APMG does not set an expiry date for ISO/IEC 20000 qualifications.
Sources. Every figure on this page comes from APMG International’s own published certification pages and from accredited training material, checked in October 2026.
We run it as a two-day in-company course with an APMG-accredited trainer, the exam at your premises or by voucher. From €640 per participant, exam included, minimum four.
See the course Try 10 free questionsBITIL.COM is an ATO (Accredited Training Organization) of APMG-International for ISO/IEC 20000® & ISO/IEC 27001® courses.
