Agile software development is gradually becoming a key component that organizations use to accomplish their goals. It is therefore important that when employers are seeking for team members, to go for candidates that will add value to their teams. Today, more than ever before, the hiring process has become complex because there are so many factors to consider in the candidates and so many candidates to consider.

For a job interview that requires some sort of agile certification, it is almost guaranteed that the applicants will be asked to give proof of their certification. The agile alliance board maintains the position that issuing certificates for a skill that cannot be acquired easily is an important identification tool. This gives confidence to the certificate holders and even if employers were to ask for a demonstration of their skills, they would manage the test. They, however still insist that having a certification does not mean you can do what is stated in the certificate.

In the software development industry, any certification means that the holder has been exposed to a certain field of study. It does not necessarily indicate the passing of exams, but having the knowledge base itself is a wonderful thing. If a certificate is later issued for having participated in a project for which a certain field of knowledge was applied, then that is even more attractive to employers. Agile certification is evidence of having a skill that is not as simple to acquire as knowledge is. It might take learners a short time to acquire the knowledge in class, but to be a professional takes time invested in real projects.

To acquire skills in agile technology, a learner must have made mistakes, corrected them, learned how to avoid them and kept repeating the process until they got perfect at it. This must happen under the close eye of a certified professional who is able to foresee the outcome even before it happens. This is the only way that a person can be said to have been properly trained.

It is fair for an employer to want to see certification to establish proper training, but it would not be a wise business decision to lock out candidates who do not hold any. There is a need for certification as a professional, but there is even greater need to put your skills into practice. Technology is fast changing and only someone who is practicing what they trained for can be able to move with the speed of new ways of doing things. It is not possible to measure the hard work that an individual will put into a project tomorrow using certification that they acquired yesterday.

Author Bio:

Ram Tavva is a senior consultant and trainer on Agile Certification for ExcelR with over 20 decades of experience. He is an alumnus of IIM Kolkata. https://www.excelr.com/