Agile Certifications - A guide for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches

I want to become Agile certified 🏅. What's the best way to go about it?

This is a question I hear often, at least twice a month. Just last week, I got variations of this question from a Manager wanting to help her organization, an Agile Coach moving towards working at a higher level, and a Scrum Master with two years of experience.

I'm writing this article to give you some direction and make sense of your choices. I'm going to tackle this question by covering these points: 

🎯 What options are available?

🎯 How to tell certifications apart and pick the best ones.

🎯 My recommendations on which certificates to pursue.

The choices

So, what options do Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches have when they want to get certified?

Well, many!

Although not a complete list, there are 270 Agile Certifications listed in this 2021 post. That's a lot! If you compare it to a 2016 post, the number of certifications has grown by 138% in five years 📈.

Sorting certifications

Certifications can be grouped based on specific attributes:

⚡️ Target Skills

⚡️ Level

⚡️ Energy Required

⚡️ Reputation

Each certification targets one or multiple skills. For example:

👉 scrum.org's Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) validates your ability as a Scrum Master to apply the Scrum framework, support Scrum Teams and solve complex problems in the real world.

👉 ICAgile Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF) targets foundational facilitation skills.

👉 scrum.org's Professional Product Owner I (PSPO I) validates your knowledge of the Scrum framework and your ability to support and enable value creation and delivery.

👉 Project Management Institute's Disciplined Agile Coach (PMI DAC) targets people who want to coach in Disciplined Agile.

While I'm not too fond of levels because they tend to be arbitrary, some certifications vary in complexity. Some are for beginners; others are for people with more (sometimes much more) experience. For example:

👉 PSM I, PSM II, and PSM III cover three levels of complexity, with different requirements around the depth of understanding and the ability to apply Scrum practices to various scenarios. 

You must invest time, money, and effort to get certified. So I broke the energy required into four sub-attributes.

👉 Price: I've included the price because money is one type of energy you invest. You converted previous effort into money, and now you reinvest.

👉 Attendance: Most certifications require an attendance of around 16h. Some don't require attendance at all. Very few require 40+ hours (sometimes reaching hundreds of hours of training).

👉 Test: Around half of the certifications require taking a test. The test can vary from 20 minutes to hours. The test difficulty can range from easy to very hard.

👉 Experience: Only some certifications require experience; an even smaller part requires proven expertise. You prove experience/expertise through a written or live interview.

Here is the certifications on the list above would rank on these four dimensions:

👉 PSM II     Price $250 | Attendance NO | Test 2hrs | Test Hard | Proven Experience NO

👉 ICP-ATF  Price $399 - $1200 | Attendance 16hrs | Test NO | Proven Experience NO

👉 PSPO I     Price $150 | Attendance NO | Test 2hrs | Test Hard | Proven Experience NO

👉 PMI DAC Price $599 - $1500 | Attendance 16hrs | Test 2hrs |  Test Hard | Proven Experience 3 years

Not all certifications hold the same weight and have the same reputation 💪. Some are well-known and respected 🌞, while others are not widely recognized. For example, you can find Scrum certifications from Scrum inc, Scrum Institute, Edwel, Coursera, and more, but they can't compare with the ones from Scrum.org or Scrum Alliance. 

I categorize reputation into three groups:

👉 Leaders: These are well-known, widely accepted organizations with excellent reputations. Examples include Scrum.org, Scrum Alliance, ICAgile, or ICF.

👉 Challengers: These are striving to reach the leader level. Examples include Large Scale Scrum, Kanban University, or Management 3.0.

👉 Niche: These certifications lack community recognition and might even carry a risk of offering questionable credentials.

I strongly suggest focusing on certifications from leader and challenger organizations. When it comes to niche providers, carefully evaluate if their certification truly holds value. When uncertain about a certification's reputation, conduct your research using resources from Google, chatbots like ChatGPT, communities, trusted individuals, and community leaders.  

My recommendations

With all this in mind, how do you choose the right certification 🎯?

Determining the value of a specific certification over another is tricky, as our career paths are diverse, our skills and plans are different and future employers might favor different certification routes. There is no silver bullet or magic list that would apply the same to all of us.

In light of all this, here is what I recommend. Aim for a mix of certifications rather than just one or two. Here is how I split my certifications:

🎯 60% essential skills like Scrum, Facilitation, Coaching, Mentoring, Agile, Lean, and Transformation.

🎯 20% product skills like Product Ownership, Design Thinking, or User Experience.

🎯 10% technical skills like Cloud Certifications, Development, DevOps, ISTQB, Marketing, or anything else your team is doing

🎯 10% diversity skills like Well-being, Public Speaking, or Creative Arts.

You can see the proportions above in my list of certifications:

👉 Essential Skills (7) ICP-ACC, SAFe SA, QAIB, ICP CAT, PSM I, PSM II, PMI DAC

👉 Product Skills (2) ICP-APO, Agile People Coach

👉 Technical Skills (1) MCSD

👉 Diversity Skills (2) Futures Thinking, Optimize Coach

Here is another example of a certification path for a Scrum Master working with a software development team:

👉 Essential Skills (6) PSM II, ICP-ATF, ICP-ACC, ICP-CAT, PSK I, Management 3.0

👉 Product Skills (2) ICP-BAF, PSPO I

👉 Technical Skills (1) AWS Certified Practitioner

👉 Diversity Skills (1) Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate

Here is another example of a certification path for an Agile Coach working with a web growth-hacking team:

👉 Essential Skills (6) PSM II, PMI DAC, Certified LeSS Practitioner, TKP, ICP-ENT, PAL-E

👉 Product Skills (2) ICP-APO, ICP-PDM

👉 Technical Skills (1) Digital Marketing Nano Degree from Udacity

👉 Diversity Skills (1) Certified Ethical Hacker

A note about me:

I'm Andrei Gavrila, I have 16+ years of experience developing great software. I am a CTO, Technical Advisor, Agile Coach and Mentor. I am also a trainer and trained over 800 people in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Leadership, Conflict Management, Clean Code, Test Driven Development, and more. I taught most people above with my own curriculum; around 50 were ICAgile certifications classes like ICP, ICP-BAF, and ICP-ATF. 

For any queries related to this post, ping me here, on Mentorcruise, or LinkedIn. I would be happy to hear from you! I also offer a free hour of mentoring to help you construct your certification plan. Apply now!