The Best Agile and Scrum Certifications in 2020

Agilemania
7 min readJan 17, 2020

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With the ever-changing IT market, its expectations, and demands, it is imperative for organizations to practice agile methods and principles. It is no exaggeration in telling that Agile is the need of the hour and market demand for agile professionals has drastically increased in the industry. And this very demand sets off the need for agile certifications.

Agile certifications not only boosts software delivery but also ameliorate delivery predictability. This article is ‘all you need to know’ about agile certifications. Explore below each section in detail.

Why Agile Certifications?

Organizations across the globe are now looking out for professionals who have experience and certification from agile, making it a primary reason for becoming agile certified. These certifications come with all benefits and help individuals during a job change or maybe scale up the career in the agile domain.

Check out some of the advantages of having agile certifications:

  1. Compensations of a higher standard.
  2. Finer Visibility.
  3. In-par with the contemporary market trends.
  4. Greater Credibility.

These are a few amongst many benefits of being agile certified. You will have a boost in your salary, increased credibility, better visibility and emulate with the current market trends.

Who can take up this training?

Explore below the potential list of professionals who can take up agile certifications:

  • Aspiring Agile coaches
  • Product owners
  • Iteration managers
  • Scrum Masters
  • Team Leaders
  • Project Managers

Benefits of Scrum and Agile Certifications:

Explore below in detail, the benefits of Scrum and Agile certification:

  • Complete and Extensive knowledge: Get complete and in-depth knowledge about Scrum and Agile and its practices. You will get a complete idea about the basics, foundation, and pillars of Agile and Scrum.
  • Change in the mindset and thinking: Developing an agile mindset is a crucial factor and agile certifications help you develop the same. Having an agile mindset plays a vital role to attain success and in being self-sustained.
  • Assistance to deliver projects in iterations: The certifications help you to have a clear understanding of concepts such as Sprint Backlog, Product Backlog, etc resulting in delivering projects in iterations.
  • Extended relevance and marketability: Having these certifications gives you practical knowledge through which you can excel in your career. You will become more marketable and relevant in your industry. Certifications are ways to prove that you have in-depth agile knowledge and an agile mindset as well.
  • A finer way of interaction with colleagues: Being agile certified brings in a lot of positive change in your work environment and in the way you interact with your peers. With your strong knowledge, you will have the potential to build and boost the core practices of Agile and Scrum.
  • Get hands-on knowledge about Scrum by practice: You will get hands-on knowledge about scrum, agile and its principles by practice. Having practical knowledge about the process boosts your credibility.
  • Join the community of Scrum experts: One of the biggest benefits of having agile certifications is the opportunity to join the community of agile and scrum experts. This will create a global networking window, resulting in having constant guidance from experts.
  • Increased Sales: Having certified agile professionals who focus on customer-satisfactory results invariably increases sales in the organization. This makes way for more business and revenue to the organization meanwhile, acquiring individual career growth.

Top 5 Agile Certifications:

Take a look at the last 1 year these top 5 Agile certifications:

1. Scrum.org

Scrum.org is the home of Scrum, and is leading the evolution and maturity of Scrum to improve the profession of software development. Scrum.org strives to provide all of the tools and resources needed by Scrum practitioners to deliver value using Scrum.

Scrum.org offers the below certifications for Scrum Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Scrum Developers.

These certifications validate recognizes the professional’s knowledge and understanding of Scrum and the application of Scrum practices and frameworks in real-time scenarios. Though it is not necessary to join any certification training from Scrum.org for the certification, it is mandatory to pass the certification exam.

2. Scrum Alliance

Scrum Alliance is one of the noteworthy organizations for people who use Scrum practices for their projects. Scrum comprises a set of practices that are used primarily in software development for the maintenance of agile projects. The following are the three most renowned certifications offered by Scrum Alliance for Agile Scrum Professionals-

Professionals who are Scrum Masters, Scrum Product Owners, and Scrum Developers can have these certifications. They are supposed to attend a two-day training program for Certified Scrum Master (SCM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) certifications. However, Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) necessitates five days of training.

3. SAFe Scaled Agilists

Also called Scaled Agilists or SAFe Agilists; SAFe Scaled Agilists is for professionals who have more than five years of experience in software testing, software development. This is a two-day training program. This certification course is mostly a detailed description of Lean-Agile leadership principles and also launching SAFe in Agile.

Meanwhile, a SAFe Agilist as well knows how to contribute to continuous development and also constantly maintaining and releasing value-added software. This course is for all those aspiring professionals who wish to learn transformational skills. It is recommended to join the SAFe Agilist course and excel in their careers.

4. Project Management Institute- Agile Certified Professional (PMI- ACP)

Offered by the Project Management Institute, the Agile Certified Professional (ACP) is one of the best project management certifications. The PMI-ACP certification is meant for those management professionals who are agile practices and methodologies in their project. This certification concedes and upholds the real-world experience and exposure of the professional.

Also, it bespeaks the skills and knowledge of the individual regarding subdomains in agile such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc. PMI- ACP professionals have to earn 30 Professional Development Units (PDU)s to renew their certification every year.

5. ICAGILE

An Agile coach serves as a mentor to the agile team, facilitating agile thinking and practices and empowering the team to reach their goals through improved team practices. By providing focused guidance, the coach enhances awareness of the business goals and objectives and acts as a teacher, guide, problem solver, team builder and planner all at once. The agile coach is able to foster a new culture of agile-lean thinking and usher in positive change by changing the organizational culture and redefining the work paradigm to reflect an agile attitude.

One of two Continuous Learning Certifications (CLCs) on the Agile Coaching and Facilitation track, the ICP-ACC training focuses primarily on the mindset, roles, and responsibilities of an Agile Coach. This workshop is unique in that it allows candidates to experience both the ‘doing’ and ‘being’ of agile coaching. With a strong focus on stimulating real-world practical scenarios, aspiring / in transition / existing coaches will be equipped with the right skills and tools to craft powerful ways to address challenges in a better manner. Candidates will learn the underlying competencies required to be successful Agile coaches who are able to deliver team and organizational outcomes to the desired levels.

How to choose the best Agile Certification

We took a quick look at the most popular Agile certifications. Now, are you confused which one suits you the best? Well, we get it. The dilemma involved in choosing the certification that’s best for you is tricky.

Below parameters can be applied while choosing.

  • What is the batch size? Too small batch or too big batch may not be good for learning
  • Teaching techniques — is it based on hands-on activities or PPT reading?
  • Ask questions like how this workshop is related to Scrum Role?
  • Ask a self-question like whether this certificate will help you to learn/try something new?
  • A workshop is generic Scrum introduction or role-specific?
  • Ask for feedback if possible.

Conclusion

After all this discussion, we can easily say that various Agile certifications assist you to improve delivery predictability and accelerate software delivery. Also, it helps in cutting down the overall cost of a project. All these certification courses also pave the way for you to get global recognition and stand out from the crowd.

Agile & Scrum training

Originally published at https://www.agilemania.com on January 17, 2020.

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Agilemania

Agilemania is an agile enablement hub, helping professionals across various industries. Offering a wide range of Agile courses from scrum methodology.