I had a completely different blog post planned for today. I even had a few paragraphs sitting in here, ready to go once I got more content to go with the story. Then I sat for my PSM1 exam for the second time. At the end, I achieved my desired goal. Due to this, I have copied over my text into a document for next time. Today, I’m celebrating my success of becoming a certified Professional Scrum Master.
Through direct feedback, perseverance, and a goal in mind, I went from someone who had no idea what Scrum was, to someone who fell in love with the idea, to a certified Scrum Master. Of course, this only means that I move on to my next step of self improvement: MySQL and Python3 bootcamps. Adaptability means I’ll make them work for me.
If anyone manages to find this little corner of the internet and wants some practical advice on becoming certified, I’ll be happy to share my methods. First, I listened to a lot of lectures to get up to speed. I bought a course from Udemy after reading through the descriptions on several courses. (The course I chose was not bad as a foundation, but due to the amount of email spam received at the end of the course, I am going to decline from naming it here.)
After I had a nice foundation to build upon, I then turned to scrum.org for refinement. I wrote out, by hand, the Scrum Guide as it was. This brings in the sense of touch to your learning, which creates a better imprint on what you are committing to memory. With that, I took the PSM1 for the first time. I missed it by what looks like 1 question. I was pretty deflated, but failure is only an opportunity for feedback and learning how to push forward.
My main mistake was not truly understanding the title of Scrum Master. In order to call myself a Scrum Master, I had to fully master Scrum in its entirety. This meant branching out from my narrow focus of just the Scrum Guide. I began by first transcribing the Nexus Guide, which focuses on scaling Scrum. Luckily for me, this document is shorter than the Scrum Guide, and the transcription did not take long to complete.
With that out of the way, I then turned to the Open Assessment tests provided by scrum.org. Some of the assessments come with wonderful feedback at the bottom of each question, regardless of whether you got the answer correct or not. I studied the scored assessments, and as I mastered one, I moved on to the next. My success came from the Nexus, Scrum, Product Manager, and Developer assessments. Since I’m not a developer, that assessment didn’t make a lot of sense at times, but the feedback at the end was invaluable.
And here I am, telling everyone that I did it. I even, for the first time ever, posted to LinkedIn. I’m very proud of myself.
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