I’ve gotten lots of questions from students in my Agile Project Management training along the lines of “What certification should I get?”. It’s understandable that there’s a lot of confusion about this because there is so much change going on in this area and it can be somewhat of a moving target to decide where to take your career direction; however, I’m not a big fan of chasing after certifications and I’d like to share some of my thoughts on that subject…
First, a lot of people seem to view a certification as a “ticket to get a new job”…For example, almost anyone can get a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) certification if they can pay the money to sit through a 2-day training course. And, various training companies have done their best to promote this idea in order to sell their training courses. There are literally hundreds of what I call “exam-cram” courses out there that are designed to get you through a certification exam and little more than that. I don’t think that’s healthy – it does a disservice to the profession and to the people getting those certifications.
I think a better way to view a certification is evidence that you already have an acceptable level of knowledge, skills, as well as actual experience to perform a given job. Unfortunately, that’s not universally true in the way many certifications are designed and implemented in the real world, but that’s a better way to look at certifications in my opinion.
Here’s the approach I recommend to my students:
- Get a good base of knowledge to make a sensible decision of what you think is the best career direction for yourself. This is not an easy thing to do because the whole area associated with Agile and; in particular, Agile Project Management is rapidly evolving and the roles in this area are also changing and evolving. It can be a moving target to try to plan your career direction in this environment.
- Once you’ve made a decision on your most logical career direction, work on developing some more knowledge that is specific to that career direction
- Acquire some real world job knowledge from working in that role
- Decide what certification is most relevant to that role and get a certification to show that you have the appropriate knowledge, skills, and experience to do that job
A lot of people seem to want to short-circuit this process and just go out and get a certification and get a job and I think that could be a big mistake without doing steps 1-3 above first.
All of the Agile Project Management training courses I’ve developed are designed around helping people take a sensible approach to exactly this problem but you have to realize that it’s not just a matter of taking an “exam-prep” course and then going out and taking a certification exam. My courses are not really designed to be “exam prep” courses – they go beyond that and try to focus on the knowledge and skills to do the job in the real world. You can find information plus current discount coupons on all of my courses here:
http://managedagile.com/training-courses/
In particular, my “How to Prepare for PMI-ACP Certification” course is a free course and has some very good information to compare various certifications related to Agile and Agile Project Management. If you have any questions about your own career direction, feel free to send me an email and I’ll be glad to help:
Send email to Chuck