Certifications: “If I Were You…”

Considerations for Individuals — My Advice

When individuals approach me with questions about training and certification, the conversation often goes like this:

• “I’ve become really interested in (Scrum | Kanban | TDD | Coaching)”
• “And I really want to work in an Agile team.”
• “How might I find a new opportunity within my company, or with other companies in the region?”

My advice is often…

“If I were you, I would…”

• attend conferences and get involved in the community;
• pursue opportunities to work with excellent teams;
• pursue opportunities to learn directly from credible experts;
• read a lot (ask your network which books they’d recommend);
• assess the return-on-investment of a certification before spending the time and effort;
• carefully assess the credibility of the certifying organization;
• and would not want to pay renewal fees;

To be clear, I am an advocate of training and certification.

I advise my clients to involve experts in various ways (e.g. coaches, consultants, mentors, trainers). But, in particular, I believe training offers the opportunity for rapid growth/change in skill — the sort of profound experiences that disconfirm everything a person thinks they know and sets the individual on a new path fueled by curiosity (the best of all intrinsic motivators). And to complement their training, I always recommend they develop an in-person network of fellow practitioners; go to conferences; check out the local meetups.

For those reasons, I will focus this blog series toward training and certifications. I trust, if you don’t share my affinity for classroom training environments, you will extrapolate from my recommendations your own learning paths via coaching, self-study, and so on.

All About Certification — A Blog Series: Table of Contents

This article is one part in a series I wrote in 2019 to address questions that I frequently receive about training courses and certifications.