Practice makes perfect!

At least that is what I do hope. Doesn't need to be perfect but perfect enough to pass mu Professional Scrum Master 1 exam.

I never was in between 2 assignments as a consultant. Due to this and probably also the lacking of motivation, I rarely invested into myself. Now with sitting on the bench, I don't have any excuses anymore to do this.
I did set 3 targets to evolve in:

• Certified Scrum Master
• Certified Product Owner within scrum
• Python

Of course, it is impossible to tackle 3 hurdles at the same time. So I had to set a priority. Python is interesting but will not help me in my daily work for the moment. Product Owner can be seen as a logical evolution being an analist. But that feels like skipping some steps. So Scrum master did get the priority.

First started out with requesting an account at Pluralsight, where enough training material can be found for all 3 tracks.
The first days I did follow some Scrum master courses, ending them with a prep exam course.
Did this old school with writing stuff down, my kids were baffled!

The next step was to see which certification I would like. There are 2 bigger certifications for scrum master. One is from scrum alliance, the other is from scrum.org. While both are recognized certifications, there are some differences.
The first difference is that at Scrum Alliance it more or less looks like you are buying the certification. You do need to follow a 2 day training course, where costs can run up to $1500. And then you also need to hope that you trainer is good and experienced enough. Also this certification has to be renewed each 2 years.
On the other side, the certification of scrum.org doesn't require you to follow a training. They do offer them, but it is up to you if you do want to follow one of these or not. You only do pay for taking the exam, which does cost $150,

Secondly the exams are also different. The scrum alliance exam consists of 35 questions and you do need to get 65% to pass the exam. At scrum.org the exam does consists of 80 questions of you do need a staggering 85% to pass. So much more difficult.

To have more freedom, I decided to go for the Scrum.org PSM1 certification. I did try out their Scrum open assessment. It is advised to score at least several consecutive time a perfect score before taking the real exam. I am getting better at it and do score from time to time a perfect score. Also did try out a Preparation quiz created by Mikhail Lapshin. In contrast to the scrum open assessment, this quiz really is 80 questions. I did try this one twice, the first time I did fail the test with 80%, the second time I did score 86%, which means I would have passed the test. You only have an hour for the 80 questions, while open book, you do have a lot of time to look for the right answers.

No, I will go reading the scrum manifest a few times. After that I will create some cards with the most important items on it. After a few more test runs, I will take the plunge for the real exam.

On Monday I will start my new assignment, which means twice a week 2h 20m in the train. Looks like an excellent place to study.

Cheers,
Peter