[TriLUG] How useful are agile certifications?

[Tim Jowers via TriLUG]

Hi Nathan,

If you want to be a manager in corporate America, then an Agile
certification may help somehow. Generally, corporate managers are the types
of people who can't code and don't really know how to create products.
Oddly, few of them have MBA's either. Go figure.

OTOH, if you want to code, then you can read some about Agile and stuff and
move on with getting real work done. Most everything in Agile, PMP, et al
is about how to shuffle work tasks and how to work with low productivity
people (PMO and other bodies setup to organize slackers). Few to no first
rate coders will learn much from any of those since good programmers
already plan tasks to a schedule as that is imperative to developing
complex systems.

In short, if you want to work for a company over a few hundred people then
the money is in being a PM and then moving into management. If you want to
create great products, well, not likely you will ever do that in any large
company, in my experience; so, you could join a startup of have a side
project.

Linux is a superb case study. As far back as a decade ago it was a free
drop-in replacement for Windows. No government or corporation in the USA
ever standardized on it from what I can tell. In fact, big corporate still
does not even support Macs. Corporate America is not about innovation or
advancement.

Being fair, there are some things you could learn from Agile; but, a
certification would just be a way to promote yourself for a PM job. If you
really wanted to start along that route then just do a PMP. It costs like
$500 and is the "gold" standard certification for PM's.

Hope this help. Just shooting some ideas from the hip. Opinions may vary.
Tim


On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 8:14 PM, Bill Trautman via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org
> wrote:

> Nathan,
>
> I would suggest going on a few job sites and finding the jobs you like.
> Have a look at the requirements.   That should give you a good Idea of what
> is valued right now.
>
> 3 general classes that seem to be in a number of the jobs I see (software
> companies and IT shops):  1) agile,  2) PM  3) Security
>
> Bill
>
> On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 6:23 PM, Nathan Yinger via TriLUG <
> trilug at trilug.org
> > wrote:
>
> > Hey,
> >
> > At work there has been some conversation about certifications, and I may
> be
> > able to get my employer to pay for some training. I would like to hear
> any
> > advice you all have about these sorts of things:
> >
> > 1) What software development certifications are most in-demand? (I know
> > this is a vague, open-ended question, but I'm pretty open to career
> > options).
> >
> > 2) Do you have any reputable suppliers of certifications to recommend?
> >
> > 3) I'm not sure how heavily most employers weight certifications. How
> much
> > time are they worth? Are there certain types of companies that value them
> > more than others?
> >
> > For a bit of background, I am working at my first software job. It's
> agile
> > teams (we shuffle regularly, and I am usually a scrum master - I heard
> that
> > looks good on a resume). We write automated tests to support firmware
> > development on embedded systems. I'm personally not married to any
> > particular career path, and my interest ranges from embedded and hardware
> > work up the stack to web development.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > ~Nathan
> > --
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