Certificates with fancy names? Yes, we have.
Last week I took two courses: Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Product Owner. If you are considering taking courses in this area, check out my experience in this blog post.
ScrumMaster and Product Owner Courses
Recommended by a teammate, I took both courses at Mountain Software. Some characteristics of the courses:
- Completely online;
- In English;
- Classes with ~25 people;
- About 4.5 hours of recorded videos (mandatory to watch);
- 2 days of live classes (7 hours of classes each day, with breaks);
- During classes, the class is divided into groups of 4 people to go through (various) exercises;
- Groups change every 3 hours.
I took one course after another, and I’m not going to lie: it was tiresome. The courses require immersion and dedication, otherwise, it is just a waste of money and time.
Coincidentally, both courses were taught by Lance Dacy (the Product Owner course would be taught by another professor who became ill). The guy is good, totally recommend him!
Both courses were paid by 10up through their Professional Development Budget.
Certification
Both courses provide ScrumAlliance certificates.
The ScrumMaster course has a test, that is easy if you pay minimal attention to the course. About the test:
- It must be done within 90 days after completing the course;
- You need to get 37 out of 50 questions correct;
- Maximum time: 60 minutes;
- Open book.
The Product Owner certificate is received at the end of the course if you watched all the recorded videos and had a good participation rate in classes and exercises.
I’ve already posted it on LinkedIn, but I’ll leave the certificates here too.
Do I recommend the courses? It depends on where you are in your career:
- I highly recommend being a Product Owner if you are responsible for any product backlog. Techniques for estimating, prioritizing, and dividing larger items are very useful.
- If you are even minimally responsible for any team, become a ScrumMaster. The organization of the whole thing is exciting and the fact that everything is more horizontal brings several benefits, although it can be a little difficult at first.
In another version, this post included an explanation of Scrum, Waterfall, the Agile Manifesto, and more. I ended up removing it so the text wouldn’t be so long, but it can become another post someday.
