I had a couple weeks of downtime between projects not long ago, and I'm not the type who could comfortability sit around and do nothing. In fact, it was an incredibly restless time. Distintered in rotting away until the next thing came around, I decided I've have a go at getting Scrum certified.
First thing was choosing between the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or the Professional Scrum Master (PSM). Reading around, it seemed like these two were fairly evenly regarded, but in my research I discovered:
- CSM courses were between A$1,500 and $2,000
- 2-3 day course
- Need 24 out of 35 to pass
- PSM course was not mandatory
- Need to score 85% of higher to Password
Now I know that there is an ongoing debate about which is the superior certification and the reasons why, but when I saw this I thought I could save heaps of money by just using my brain. I consider myself a resourceful person and a pretty quick learner (plus having been in a handful of Scrum projects), so I decided to tackle the PSM-I.
How I designed my self study plan
I came across these two blog posts where I drew all of my inspiration from:
- How to Self Study and Clear PSM-I in Your First Attempt by Prashant
- How to become a certified Scrum Master by Mikhail Lapshin
But I thought they were a bit overkill, and didn't want to overengineer the study plan. So here is what I really did:
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Read the Scrum Guide everyday until I took the exam. The Scrum Guide is the Bible if you want to learn (and get certified in) Scrum. It's around a one hour of so read. I wrote the whole thing out by hand once, and then typed it all out once, just to burn it into my body - this part is optional.
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Read the Scrum Glossary everyday until I took the exam. The Scrum Glossary is like an expansion pack to the Scrum Guide. About a fifteen minute read, also did the hand writing and type out thing here.
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Read the Management Plaza Scrum Master Training manual. This training manual had the best visualisations which was an incredible aid to study. Apparantly, it does have some errors or deviations from the Scrum Guide, so when you run into conflicting information, always refer to the Scrum Guide as the prevailing source of truth. I hacked together a word document with the Scrum Guide and the visualisations from this and used it in my daily reading.
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Read Scrum - A Pocket Guide. I bought this on Kindle for about A$14, and it was hands down my favourite reading material out of all. I found that it elaborated upon the Scrum concepts ingreater detail to help me build a more rounded-out understanding, and the book was structure very similarly to how I think. I didn't know how to highlight in the Kindle App so I've got a bunch of snippets written up in my study notes.
Practice assessments
When it came to practice assessments, I thought I would only refer to two resources:
I did the Scrum open about 2-3 times a day for a week, aiming to get through it in five minutes or less to really push my wit. And then I took Mikhail's scrum quizzes about three times in learning mode, and twice in real mode. The goal was to average 90% or higher in each attempt. To be fair, the first attempt on Mikhail's quiz brutally highlighted the gaps in my study which I fast and furiously sought to resolve.
There were many recommndations to also get up to speed on Nexus, the Product Owner Open and Developer Open, but I skipped those.
Taking the exam
The exam format is 80 multiple choice questions to be completed within 60 minutes. A score of 85% of higher is required to pass.
Fortunately, many of the questions on the Scrum Open and Mikhail Lapshin's quizzes were thamtically very similar to those that made an apparance on my exam. (Although, that's to be expected right, if you study for the Scrum exam you should be seeing questions about Scrum.) My first impression of the exam, the quiz interface is surprisingly far more clunky compared to the open assessments.
My approach to the exam was to quickly answer the questions I was confident in, and bookmark whichever questions that I couldn't answer in 20 seconds or less. Then I'd review the bookmarked questions and answer to my best understanding, and finally review every answer I'd given. There are some sneakily worded questions in there - Be vigilant!
But how did I do?
I was pleasantly surprised with a score of 95%. Not bad considering I had avoided the recommended associated study areas #humblebrag
Certification costs came to US$150 for the exam and A$14 for study materials. So roughly a total of A$215. I could not be happier to get Scrum certified dirt cheap.
Hopefully this helps someone staring down Scrum certification costs and gets them on their way to kicking the door down.