Getting Agile Training: When Are You Ready?

Don is an entrepreneur and business leader with over 15 years experience specializing in aligning management-driven technologies and initiatives together with business and project strategies resulting in thoroughly planned and comprehensive business solutions. His expertise as a project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner has spanned across diverse industries such as finance, retail, health care and information technology

  Agile   Career Development  

Training and certifications have become a very big part of the project management industry. In my opinion, these really took off about a couple decades ago when the internet and all the technologies around it burst on the scene and we were all forced to keep learning new systems and applications. Many of us in the IT industry took advantage of this to see a way to leverage training and certification programs to gives us a competitive edge.

The PMP certification followed this trajectory and is now one of the worlds’s leading project management certifications. In the agile camp is the ScrumMaster along with a new kid on the block from PMI: the Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP). But there have already been a plethora of discussions related to the pros and cons of each of these certifications (and certifications in general), and whether they really test for competency or are just a regurgitation of knowledge. That’s not what interests me, and is not the focus of this article.

What I would like to focus on is the fact that what these growing certifications indicate is that people need training. Many companies seem to be in agreement as they are shelling out millions (perhaps billions) per year to train their staff. For organizations or individuals within a department of an organization, the decision to get agile training is a question that’s part of…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.