Service Manager - Hours?

[Sirrom]

I work for a large company that has been training staff in ITIL Foundations. I have 9 years of IT management experience and have an ITIL Foundation certification. I have an opportunity to pursue Practionier certifications or a Service Manager Certification. I have been researching and I understand the course setup for the Service Manager Certificaiton. However, what I am not finding is an accurate esitmate of how many hours per day is required of self study for the ITIL Service Manager certification, (I realize that everyone learns differently).

If this is 2-3 hours per day then I can squeeze that time in, if it's anymore I can't fit that in to my day as I have a day job and a couple of active kids. I am looking for an answer from a person or persons who has/have actually been through these courses as this answer will determine if I have the time to pursue the Service Manager certification.

Thank you!!

[rjp]

The practitioner courses are 3 full contact days - the 3rd day is the onsite assessment day.

I believe face to face assessment is a requirement - so I am pretty sure most accredited trainerrs would be delivering a 3 day course.

[dobbin]

My advice is to attend a Practitioners course first, or even 2 if possible. This will get you into ITIL course mode.
The Foundation course is very much a classroom listen, learn and ask questions course whereas both Practitioner and Managers involves classroom, group discussion, presentations and a great deal of studying. The Managers course comprises of 1 week for the Service Support and another week for the Service Delivery elements. If you are not involved in most of the elements that make up the whole of the Managers certificate it can be very hard work, unfortunately at the time I wasn't.
It would be better for you to attend a residential course through one of the many ITIL training companies available, Pink, Fox IT etc. This should then get you both the courses, the study day and the exams as one package. Also try and get it through the company as it is not cheap - course, hotel, study day and exams. The exams, the last I heard, were 2 x 3hr closed book, held once a quarter and you need to pass both before attaining the coverted red badge.
Between the course(s) and the study day depending on ability you will need to do around 1 to 1.5 hours a night of self study. Someone I know did a Practitioners course just before his exams and passed first time with a very good score.
Hope this helps and good luck.