ServiceNow: Basic Administration

When only one or two people understand how your ServiceNow instance works, every access request, form change, and broken workflow can become a bottleneck or a risky production edit. ServiceNow: Basic Administration gives help desk staff, junior system admins, and IT Practitioners moving into ITSM a shared, structured foundation in day-to-day platform administration.

Role fit: This is a beginner course. It suits teams standardizing who can safely handle common ServiceNow admin work, including user and role management, basic platform navigation, lists, reports, and day-to-day admin tools. It does not cover custom app development.

Risk and change control: Your team learns the ServiceNow admin mindset for handling platform changes deliberately instead of relying on ad hoc edits. The course introduces core admin responsibilities and the tools used to manage access, understand interfaces, and complete commonly requested administrative tasks.

Time investment: About 13 hours across 16 skills of roughly 45–53 minutes each. A Team Lead can schedule it as one skill per working session over several weeks.

Business outcomes: Learners build practical familiarity with ServiceNow administration, including user and role management, common admin tasks, lists, basic reporting, and the responsibilities most ServiceNow admins handle day to day.

Recurring challenge-and-solution exercises give learners hands-on practice. For teams going further, the course is a natural step before CBT Nuggets' ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA) training.

IT teams use this training to turn ServiceNow from a ticketing tool into a platform they can configure, automate, and change with less risk. Instead of abstract feature tours, team members build working systems, including a room reservation app and an automated employee onboarding flow, using the same tools they’ll touch on the job.

• Faster, more consistent onboarding: Your team will automate multi-department handoffs, such as getting a laptop provisioned, secured, and shipped to a new hire. They’ll use Flow Designer, approvals, and reusable subflows so common steps aren’t rebuilt in every workflow.
• Safer access control: Admins learn to manage users, groups, roles, and ACLs. They then impersonate users to confirm what each role can actually see before changes reach employees.
• Lower-risk deployments: Team Leads can standardize how changes move from development to QA to production. Clear review steps help reduce disruption for production users.
• Better visibility for leadership: Practitioners build reports, KPIs, and breakdowns that track service performance. They also learn to validate report data and troubleshoot dashboard results so leadership can trust what they’re seeing.

The course also covers Service Catalog items, record producers, and email-triggered flows. With these skills, your team can replace manual requests and inbox-driven issue reporting with structured, trackable processes that reduce dependence on outside contractors for routine platform work.

Knowledge

• How ServiceNow instances (development, QA, production), applications, and modules fit together, and why changes move through environments before reaching production
• How users, groups, and roles combine to control who can do what, and how ACLs restrict access to data
• How tables store organizational data, including application-scoped custom tables and links between tables
• How ServiceNow automation and workflow tools coordinate multi-step, multi-department processes such as onboarding and approvals
• How update sets capture configuration changes for testing and deployment, and what happens when one is backed out
• How lists, charts, and reporting views turn platform records into trackable operational information

Ability

• Create and test roles and access by impersonating users to confirm what each person actually sees
• Build custom tables and forms with Form Builder, such as a course-completion tracking system
• Publish Service Catalog items with variables and record producers, then connect them to approval workflows
• Configure email notifications and workflow automations that respond to incoming emails, including creating and assigning incidents
• Package changes in update sets and apply them to production with minimal disruption to users
• Combine tables, ACLs, workflows, and notifications into working solutions like a room reservation system and an automated onboarding workflow