Certificates Are Just That

Uncle Bob writes a great post tackling Scott Ambler’s poke at Scrum Certification.

While I understand the concern regarding getting a certificate for attending a two-day course. And I understand that the Scrum Alliance is now instituting an exam… I wouldn’t dream of being an outsider questioning Ken’s intentions behind the ideas. Instead, I assume he and the Scrum Alliance have nothing but the best intentions for the industry.

The world will sort this out… Welcome to free enterprise. If HR folks decide to use a piece of paper as a measure of something important to them, and it doesn’t yield the desired results, they will adapt.

If folks hire people based solely on a piece of paper, they’ll likely get inconsistent results, and be free to change their ways. Or not. If people think that doing software or managing a software project is learnable in a two-day course, they are free to act on that hypothesis. Learning is a daily privilege.

A 2-day course to get a certificate or four years at a college to get a certificate… neither truly represent the ability of an individual to perform in a certain capacity at a certain organization on a specific project.

IMHO, there isn’t much to get in a huff about… move along, nothing to see.

BTW: I am UML Certified, so hire me! (I’ll just keep it a secret that I didn’t have to take a course (just helped James Odell beta test the exam)! The certification does not test *if* you can model, but only that you know the syntax of the modeling elements. BFD.)