At our open-hour session, we interact live with the audience to clarify their queries on agile and project management. We also explore learning and certification paths. You may also want to attend it live. It is conducted on the 2nd and 4th Friday at 7 PM IST (+5.5 GMT).
Here are the top questions discussed in our Live Open Hour Episode#38 session, which was streamed live on 12th August 2022, many queries asked by Participants regarding the right certification/training for professional growth were discussed by our expert Saket Bansal.
Question: How to decide which certification I should do to accelerate my career growth?
Here is the summarised answer given by Saket Bansal for each question asked by participants-
Question: How to decide which certification I should do to accelerate my career growth?
Saket: My recommendation would be to first figure out your target role and aspirations because random additions of certification may not add any value to your profile. So better analyse what you want to be next or what interest you most and based on that decide the next role and supporting certification required for your inspired role.
Question: I have 10+ years of experience as a technical manager. What certification will be good for me?
Saket: Selection of certification is completely based on your aspirations. If you want to switch to a leadership and management role, you should learn things that will help you play such roles. If you’re going to get into a team-level leadership role, you should focus on learning skills like facilitation, coordinating among the team, and taking things forward. You can learn these all with the help of Certified Scrum Master (CSM) certification.
If your organization is not working in agile ways or doing contracting and outsourced work, you aspire to be a project manager. In that case, you should focus on gaining knowledge on topics invoicing, costing, capacity planning, risk management and other things related to the project management role. The Project Management Professional (PMP) program will be a good starting point.
So based on your interest, you can choose any of the above career paths.
Question: I am a certified SAFe Advanced Scrum Master. Can you help me with the next certification I should go for? Should I go for SAFe Product Owner/Product Manage or Leading SAFe?
Saket: If you have done an advanced scrum master program from Scaled Agile, then I assume you have a good understanding of Scaled Agile principles, patterns, the role of scrum master in the PI planning meeting, facilitating various iteration level events, and supporting release training engineer at a program level events. So, if you go for Leading SAFe, there will be a good amount of content overlap; hence, this will not be much beneficial for you. If you are interested in a training, mentoring or coaching role, then for that scaled agile has a special certificate called implementing SAFe with Safe Program Consultant (SPC) certificate. However, it is an expensive program, and a renewal fee is involved.
Question: I want to work as a Scrum master but am afraid most companies do not accept full-time Scrum master roles. So, can you suggest me some good options that I can plan for?
Saket: There can be multiple options based on the company you are working in or want to work for. Project management will be a good choice if you work in a service-based company, and doing PMP can help you progress in Project Management.
If you are working in a product-based company, you first need to figure out which area inside your domain space you would like to work on. Based on your interest, choose an area and start investing there. For example, you can also assist your product owner/business analyst if that interests you. Another possible option is that you can start facilitating multiple scrum teams and be a full-time Scrum Master. You support multiple teams, and this can also lead you to an Agile Coaching role.
So based on your interest and available opportunity, you can choose any of the possible options.
Question: How can I get practical experience for the Scrum Master role other than getting into a project?
Saket: We have a program called the Industry Enabled Scrum Master program. In this program, we cover topics like questions most asked in Scrum Mater interviews and other Scrum Master’s skills. Our focus is to give you practical knowledge/ideas over theoretical knowledge which you acquired by doing certification programs like CSM, PSM or any other scrum-related certification.
Apart from this, you should also focus on Scrum Master competencies like facilitation, people management, conflict management, resolving issues, coordinating, and ensuring communications and other scrum master role-related competencies.
So, you can educate yourself and work on enhancing the skills and competencies required for Scrum Master and suggest you join our IESM program, which will surely be a good push towards your journey of preparation for the Scrum Master role.
Question: I have done Certified Scrum Master certification and my organization is following only Agile processes. Will SAFe advance Scrum Master certification be good for me?
Saket: I suggest you do Leading SAFe certification if you are interested in learning the Scaled Agile framework because this program is more elaborate. However, if your goal is just to understand the Scrum Master role in the SAFe context then you can go ahead with the SAFe Advance Scrum Master program.
Question: Last month I completed the CSM certification. However, I am not able to clear any interviews. Can you please help me out?
Saket: Try to get feedback whenever you go for an interview and figure out what is not working. Mostly there will be two cases: you are not applying for the right job as per your competencies and knowledge or you are not yet ready for your target segment.
If you are not yet ready with your Scrum Master skills, then you can refer to our 70+ videos Scrum Master interview series available on the YouTube channel. In these videos, we discuss various Scrum scenarios and help with a few possible solutions to resolve these issues in the Scrum master context. You can also join our weekly Instagram sessions to discuss your queries.
With this, you can do a practice interview with the help of a mentor or friend and know their feedback to understand what needs to be fixed.
If you are struggling to understand the questions or the terms used by the interviewer, then you can join our bridge program called the Industry Enabled Scrum Master program. In this program, you will learn about the day-to-day job done by a Scrum master in an organization.
So based on the area of improvement, you can follow the suggested options.
Question: I am looking for earning PDUs and SEUs for renewing my PMI-ACP and CSP certifications. Can you talk about education learning from iZenBridge?
Saket: You can watch some videos, attend webinars, or read books and you can claim PDUs and SEUs for these.
Earning SEUs is simple nowadays because they don’t even go in-depth about what you read or claim points for. You just need to declare what you studied, and you will earn points.
For PDUs it is a little detailed one. We have a blog for this called “How to earn PDUs for free” you can refer to this blog and with this, you can also refer to videos on our YouTube channel related to PDUs earning.
Question: I have been a CSP for more than five years and want to take this to next level. What is the growth path and how iZenBridge can help me in this course?
Saket: You can target acquiring a Certified Team Coach (CTC) certification because that is a good option after being a Certified Scrum Professional. A certified team coach requires a fair understanding of coaching, and then you can study the application, which you can find out on Scrum Alliance.
You should acquire a coaching certificate to be a good team coach candidate. You can do ACC from International Coach Federation, and we can help you in doing ICF-ACC certification by facilitating your overall coaching journey.
We can also help you in CTC mentoring with our enterprise coach once you have good coaching knowledge with the help of ICF-ACC certification.
So, feel free to connect with us for ICF-ACC and CTC mentoring.
To get more assistance, you can connect with the iZenBridge Team.
📧Email us at (sales@izenbridge.com)
📞WhatsApp Us: +91-9958287711
For more such insights and a lot of interaction with the industry experts, stay tuned for our next “Live Open Hour” which is conducted Every second and fourth Friday at 7 PM IST on
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