^{ITIL Career Growth & ITSM Skills Demand in the Ivory Coast (2026 Outlook)}

^{Introduction—Confusion in the Market}

Most IT professionals, students, and experienced engineers from the Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) are questioning whether or not they should be using ITIL frameworks in 2026, as AI, DevOps, and cloud-based platforms begin to dominate the IT market and create new opportunities for organizations.

Organizations are moving towards digitizing many of their processes; banking, public services (i.e., smart cities), telecommunications, and enterprise systems are all popular examples of what businesses have done on this path so far. Unfortunately, many of these organizations struggle with issues related to their ability to provide reliable services, governance, and operational control because they do not know what framework to implement or how to use it effectively.

There is a split between those who believe that ITIL 4 provides support to all types of service management (ITSM) professionals and those who believe that DevOps has essentially replaced all elements of traditional ITSM (for example, troubleshooting). In fact, many organizations have begun to combine automation capabilities with traditional ITSM structures, therefore making the ITIL Digital Transformation (ITIL DT) framework an extremely important component of their overall business strategy.

As the Ivory Coast's digital economy continues to grow, companies are no longer looking for simply developers or system administrators. Instead, they are looking for individuals who can demonstrate a clear understanding of how technology enables an organization to achieve its business objectives, manage risk effectively, and deliver high-quality, reliable services (the true purpose of ITSM).

^{Digital Growth in the Ivory Coast Is Driving ITSM Demand}

One of the fastest-growing digital markets in West Africa is the Ivory Coast. Banks are moving their services to mobile devices, telecommunications companies are expanding their 5G infrastructure networks, and government agencies are investing in e-services. However, as these markets grow, there will also be increased complexity, requiring the need for a structure.

Organizations face challenges with their IT services, including:

Customers experience regular outages of services.

Failure of development and operations teams to coordinate effectively.

Risks and compliance issues with migrating to the Cloud.

Lack of standardization in their incident and change management processes.

While coding or infrastructure upgrades will not solve the underlying challenges of managing complexity, organizations will require proper governance and service lifecycle management to address these issues. This is why organizations are hiring professionals trained in ITIL, ITSM, and ITIL 4 Foundation principles.

Organizations are transitioning their IT departments in Abidjan and other large urban areas from "technology support teams" to service delivery organizations..

^{Why ITIL Skills Are Becoming Essential in 2026}

As the way organizations measure the success of their IT teams changes, so too has the demand for ITIL training certification. Previously, there was an emphasis on uptime and ticket closures to determine whether a team had been successful; however, today, teams are judged by how well they meet the requirements of larger business objectives (such as the end-users’ experience, service quality and availability, digital trust, etc.). In other words, ITIL helps organizations strategically connect the IT department to the larger business, and, as such, organizations are no longer using isolated teams in how they operate. Rather, they are utilizing value streams, automating workflows, and creating processes to continually improve services.

Individuals with ITIL certifications can:
Design stable digital services
Manage incidents with no negative impact to the business
Align the IT department with overall company goals
Implement continuous improvement in operations

As such, due to these factors, organizations in the banking, telecom, fintech, and public sectors are looking for candidates who have received training and certification through ITIL over individuals with a pure technical skill set.

^{The Role of ITIL 4 Foundation in Career Growth}

The ITIL 4 Foundation Certification is the starting point of all modern service management jobs in the Ivory Coast, and it teaches much more than just processes—it teaches a way of thinking that is all about adding value and not just managing tools.

Several professional roles have now arisen as people have moved into them through their ITIL knowledge and skills, roles including
IT Support Lead,
Service Delivery Analyst,
Change Manager,
Cloud Operations Specialist, Digital‍

Every one of these individuals is now required to have an understanding of ITIL concepts.

Unlike previous versions, ITIL 4 has shifted from an ITIL of IT people managing IT tools to an ITIL of collaboration between IT (Dev/Ops) and automation.

This is one of the many reasons why companies using the latest modern infrastructure still depend on ITIL conceptual frameworks to define and structure their work within an accelerated environment.

_{ITIL Cloud and AI Governance}

Organizations in Ivory Coast will likely have a hybrid environment consisting primarily of on-premises systems; however, many are also running public cloud and using AI-based automation by the year 2026. The lack of governance for this type of environment creates significant security risks and continues to contribute to service instabilities.

The governance through ITIL-Cloud & AI assists these organizations in the following:

Control automated decision-making systems
Maintain compliance and readiness for auditing
Manage AI-based incident response
Monitor service/local reliability for all platforms.

Organizations that have relied on automated systems without proper governance have experienced outages and damage to the organization's reputation. To avoid experiencing this level of damage, companies require highly trained professionals in the usage of tools as well as in service life cycle management.

^{ITIL Future Roadmap and Industry Direction}

The ITIL roadmap is less about transforming ITIL 4 but rather broadening its scope and application with respect to digital ecosystems. ITIL now also contains frameworks for managing cloud operations and managing AI operations, as well as supporting cross-functional service management.

In the Ivory Coast, this evolution away from primarily technical maintenance-focused IT careers towards value-driven careers is evident. Companies prefer value-driven IT professionals who can effectively communicate with executives and manage vendors, as well as provide excellent customer service.

As such, employers are placing increased importance on IT professionals possessing ITIL knowledge within their respective job descriptions (i.e., related to cloud engineers and security engineering teams).

Examples of careers available to ITIL-certified professionals:

After acquiring an ITIL certification, IT professionals frequently find themselves in career paths vastly different from those associated with support engineer job functions. Companies will always prefer hiring an ITIL-certified individual because of the reduced risk of outages and/or other operational incidents.

Some typical career paths would be as follows: Support Engineer → ITSM Analyst → Service Manager → Digital Operations Manager.
With the use of professional ITIL certification by companies, organizations are increasingly confident that they can trust ITIL-certified individuals to manage their business-critical resources over and above just maintaining their infrastructure.

^Conclusion

Ivory Coast’s boom in IT has produced a different kind of IT professional—an individual who understands the combination of technology with business value. Organizations have moved away from seeking solely engineers who are capable of designing systems to instead look for those who can provide stability and scalability in service delivery.

Due to this change, ITIL's digital transformation framework will be redefined as part of career success by 2026. Rather than becoming obsolete, ITIL now operates in conjunction with cloud computing and DevOps, both of which serve as foundational components of contemporary service management.