Life-long learners meet an industry flooded with certifications
A collegue once bemoaned that so many agilists collect certifications like baseball cards. With such a proliferation of Agile certifications from Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, ICAgile, Scaled Agile, and PMI to name a few, it’s easy to see how the agile community garners this impression. And when you encounter a few people who’s email signuature contains more letters after their name than in it, you come face-to-face with the explosion of certifications exists in our industry.
On one hand, the proliferations of all of these agile certifications is simple economics. Businesses demand agile and Scrum experts and certifications are an easy way to demonstrate knowledge of agile. And if employers are demanding these certifications, then employees (and employers) will pay for them. And if enough demand exists, organizations will rise up to supply.
The very nature of agile development instills a culture of experimentation and learning. In my experience, most agilists are life long learners and always seek new sources of information and opportunties to learn. Some, like myself, seek that learning from books and first hand experience. Others flourish on conferences and meetup groups. Yet others seek certifications as way to build their resume and brand to the world, seeking outside validation that they possess a specific aspect of knowledge and skills that are useful to an organization.
For those already with agile certifications, additional certifications provide one more benefit - reminding attendees of the agile basics. We all get caught up in our day-to-day operations and get bogged down in office politics. We become blind to the sacrifices we have made in order to get work done. Sometimes we take shortcuts. Sometimes, we become the evil that we sought to vanguish. At times, it takes returning to the source material on order for us to notice or recognize what we are doing wrong. At other times, we need the energizing interaction that comes from agile certifications, training, or conferences.
Certifications play a unique role in our industry. They serve a dual purpose in providing training and recognition for the mastery of a topic. They also serve as a marketing tool to help spread a particular framework, mindset, process, or tool. This can be seen most clearly if we go back to the early days of agile, when XP and Scrum were the main frameworks. Scrum embraced certifications as a way to rapidly train new experts in the framework. XP choose to forego certifications, taking a more skeptical view of their usefulness, likely born out of the general negative opinion developers had of certifications in the late 90s and early 2000s. If we look at the landscape now, Scrum is widely embraced and XP exists only in pockets and in specific practices like pair programming.
Certifications in the agile community is the prevailing standard. Applying for a new Scrum Master or Release Train Engineer position will require a certification. Even XP has made the pivot, with XP certifications now available from the Extreme Programming Alliance. While others may bemoan the state of our industry, it’s up to each of us to decide how we’ll shape our career, embracing the certifications or finding another way to showcase our expertise and our commitment to life-long learning.