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Updated on 15 October 2026. What’s new: the pmp exam now follows PMI's July 2026 content outline (People 33%, Process 41%, Business Environment 26%), and the PMBOK Guide is now in its Eighth Edition

The Sixth Edition of the PMBOK Guide is no longer the one to upgrade to: PMI has since published a Seventh Edition (2021) and an Eighth (November 2025), and the PMP exam is now written from PMI's July 2026 Exam Content Outline rather than from any single edition of the guide. What changed from one edition to the next, and what you should actually read for the PMP or the CAPM, is the question this article answers.

What changed between the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth editions of the PMBOK Guide?

Each edition changed the shape of the book, not just its page count. The Sixth Edition was organised by process: ten Knowledge Areas laid across five Process Groups, with inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs listed for each process. The Seventh Edition dropped that frame and rebuilt the guide around principles and performance domains. The Eighth Edition kept the principles-and-domains foundation but trimmed it and brought process guidance back in a less rigid form.

ITIL and Six Sigma are not rivals, and picking one is mostly a question of what your job produces. ITIL 4 Foundation (40 questions, 60 minutes, 65% to pass, USD $463) proves you can run IT services the way a service provider should. An ASQ Six Sigma belt proves you can measure a process and shrink its variation. Service desks use the first; improvement teams use the second.

People who search "itil vs six sigma" usually have one of two jobs in mind. Either they run or support IT services and wonder whether a quality credential would add anything, or they work in quality and operations and keep hearing that IT is a good place to apply their tools. Both groups are right to wonder, because the two bodies of knowledge were built to answer different questions and fit together better than their reputations suggest. The sections below set out what each one does, how the exams compare, where the methods meet, and which one to sit first.

What problem does each one actually solve?

Think of a support team that closes most tickets inside the promised time but still has a bad month. ITIL helps you describe the team's work as services, agree what "promised" means, and organise the practices behind it. Six Sigma helps you ask why the bad month happened and whether it will happen again. One gives you the operating model; the other gives you the measuring instrument.

A tester two years into the job rarely asks whether certification is good in general. The real question is which certificate to take next and whether anyone will notice. With ISTQB the answer depends on your job: the Foundation certificate (CTFL, USD $229, 40 questions in 60 minutes) opens the ladder, and each step after it only pays off when it matches the work you want to do.

This guide treats the scheme as a ladder and asks one question at every rung: which job does this step belong to, and what does it change for the person who holds it? It deliberately skips the habits that make you a better tester and what employers gain from hiring certified staff; both are covered elsewhere on the blog. Every exam figure comes from ISTQB or from the exam sheet, and salary figures are left out because none could be checked against a source page that loads today. The ISTQB pages were read in October 2026.

What does the ISTQB ladder look like from Foundation to Expert?

ISTQB groups its Certified Tester scheme into four bands on its certifications page: Core Foundation, Core Advanced, Specialist and Expert Level. Most testers will only ever stand on the first two. The other two exist for people who have chosen a niche or a leadership route and have the years of work to back it.

Updated on 12 October 2026. What’s new: pmp is now 180 questions in 240 minutes, and prince2 7 foundation is 60 questions in 60 minutes

It depends on where and for whom you work. Job adverts in the UK, much of Western Europe and Australia, and in public bodies that follow UK practice, tend to name PRINCE2; in North America they more often name PMP. The PMP exam has 180 questions in 240 minutes and costs USD $425 for PMI members or USD $675 for others, while PRINCE2 7 Foundation has 60 questions in 60 minutes and costs USD 338.

That split is a tendency, not a rule, which is why a general ranking of the two credentials is not much use. A project manager in a London council and a project manager in a Texas software firm can both be excellent and both be right to pick different exams. This guide sets out what each credential is, how the two compare on eligibility, format and cost, how your experience changes the order, and whether holding both is sensible. It was checked against PMI’s July 2026 exam content outline and PeopleCert’s PRINCE2 7 pages in October 2026.

ITIL, originally short for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is the most widely used framework for managing IT services worldwide. Examples of IT services include a company's central email system and its websites, which depend on back-end IT processes such as server and network management. By adopting the ITIL framework, companies make sure their services are delivered through a set of consistent, well-defined processes built on best practices, which gives customers a predictable level of service.

The advantages of ITIL embrace decreased the price of duty growth and deployment, improved buyer satisfaction with service supply, high productiveness from IT personnel, high-quality enhancements, higher administration metrics of providers, and high flexibility in adapting providers to altering enterprise necessities. How can one argue with any of that?

ITIL Certification Program Overview

Every ITIL credential is known as a "qualification" in ITIL-speak, and all ITIL qualifications are a part of the broader qualification scheme. In July 2013, possession of ITIL was transferred to AXELOS, which maintains the ITIL framework and accredits coaching and examination institutes. Tons of ITIL Accredited Training Organizations (ATOs) can be found to ship coaching, and ITIL qualification review are administered by Examination Institutes (EIs), a lot of which work immediately with the ATOs.