Let me be transparent before launching into this: I am a Certified Scrum Trainer. For the past twelve years, part of my business has involved certifying people in Agile practices. I have skin in the game, which is precisely why I feel entitled — and obligated — to say some of this out loud.

This is the sixth post in the Agile Mishaps series. If you are joining late, start at the beginning with What Went Wrong with Agile? and work forward.

The idea was reasonable

In the beginning, Agile certification was a genuinely sensible concept. It offered a standardised proof of competency in a field where expertise was difficult to evaluate from the outside. In contexts where not everyone has access to formal university education, certifications can democratise professional validation — providing a recognised credential without requiring a £50,000 degree.

When Scrum Alliance was established as the pioneering certification body, followed by Scrum.org after an internal split, both organisations maintained a focus on rigorous standards and meaningful assessment of understanding. The intent was credible.

Then the market got involved

The deterioration began when organisations entered the space primarily as businesses rather than as custodians of professional standards. The most egregious example is SCRUMStudy, which managed to convert the famously concise Scrum Guide — a document of roughly 13 pages — into a 300-page manual. This is not a feat of enrichment. It is a feat of dilution. The more rules you add to a framework explicitly designed around simplicity and professional judgment, the more you undermine the thing you are certifying people in.

Scrum Alliance is not without its own contradictions. Certified Scrum Trainers — the category I hold — are not required to maintain active practitioner experience in the field. A trainer can spend years delivering training without ever applying Scrum in a real organisational context. The risk is obvious: theoretical instruction delivered by someone increasingly disconnected from the messy reality of what they are teaching.

The home-made variety

Two categories of self-invented certification have proliferated and both give me pause.

The first is corporate certifications, where companies create their own programmes to lend credibility to their training offerings. Without oversight from a body with genuine standards, these programmes have no external accountability. The learner has no reliable way of knowing whether the credential they have earned represents anything meaningful.

The second is thought-leader certifications, where an individual with a popular book and a following establishes a certification programme in their own framework. The quality of these varies enormously but the structural problem is consistent: the curriculum reflects one person's perspective, shaped by their biases and commercial interests, with no independent mechanism for quality assurance.

The badge collection problem

Perhaps the most widespread problem in the certification landscape is not any specific certification body — it is the culture of accumulation that has grown up around them. Many professionals treat certifications like stamps in a passport: the more acronyms on the LinkedIn profile, the more expert they appear. The pursuit of credentials has become, in many cases, more important than the development of actual capability.

Genuine competence in Agile — the kind that helps real organisations change in durable ways — is not produced by a two-day workshop, however good the trainer. It develops through sustained practice, honest feedback, and ongoing reflection. A certification can be the beginning of that journey. It is rarely, by itself, a meaningful part of it.

This was the fifth and final mishap I chose to address in this series. In the concluding post — Despite All the Mishaps: Show Me the Better Option — I make the case that Agile, for all its accretions of nonsense, remains the most useful paradigm we have for developing complex products in uncertain environments. The circus does not negate the value of what it is supposed to certify.