One possible low-cost way to earn SEUs

Submitted by Yuliya Mijuk on 05/11/2016
CSP Seal

What requirements must be met before you can submit the CSP (Certified Scrum Professional) application to the Scrum Alliance?

  • A valid CSM, CSPO or CSD certification.
  • 36 months of work experience in Scrum, collected during the last 5 years.
  • 70 SEUs (Scrum Education Units or learning hours), collected during the last 3 years. Actually, there are only 54 or even fewer SEUs to collect, because the first SUEs are earned during the CSM, CSPO or CSD certification courses.

To collect 54 SEUs within three years is a realistic goal. If you live in Zurich or nearby, you can, for example:

  • regularly visit Agile Breakfast events (The next dates for the event can be found on http://www.swissict.ch/expertenwissen/fachanlaesse/. Just put "Agile Breakfast" into the search field). Each Agile Breakfast will bring you 2 SEUs in Category A;
  • participate at the LAS (Lean Agile & Scrum) conference (http://www.lean-agile-scrum.ch) - 8 SEUs in category A annually, as the conference lasts only one day;
  • read two or three books or articles on Scrum, watch videos on different agile topics, visit webinars. The website of the Scrum Alliance is an inexhaustible source for self-learners. Most interesting are perhaps the Community and the Learning Consortium webinars that usually take place monthly (https://www.scrumalliance.org/learn-about-scrum/community-webinars). We should just keep in mind that the SEUs that can be earned staying at home belong into the category Independent Learning and may not exceed the number of 15.

And if you do not live in Zurich, then you go to the website of Scrum Alliance, choose a Scrum User Group (https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/user-groups) which is situated close to you and try to regularly attend the events of this group. It’s better not to use the event list of the Scrum Alliance, if you want to find the events of some Scrum User Group, which will take place in the near future, because the event list is unfortunately definitely incomplete. It looks like most user groups often do not bother to register their events on the website of the Scrum Alliance. They prefer to use their own website and the social networks to draw attention to the events.

Assuming the Scrum User Group you’ll find has monthly sessions which last about 2 hours, the group has no holiday breaks or spontaneous cancellations, then you can earn 24 points in one year only through your active participation in the Scrum User Group events. So 3 years is for sure a realistic period to collect the necessary number of SEUs without getting stressed.

The plan or the result of the SEU-collecting could look like that:

SEU category Event SEUs earned SEUs max. possible
B: Scrum Alliance Courses or Coaching CSM, CSPO or CSD Course 16 Unlimited
E: Independent Learning Books, articles, webinars 15 15
A: Scrum Alliance Scrum Gathering Scrum Alliance-endorsed User Group 40 45
Total: 71

There are more not previously mentioned learning categories, which can be relevant for someone: C: Outside Events (up to 15 SEUs); D: Volunteer Service (up to 15 SEUs); Q. Other Collaborative Learning (up to 15 SEUs).

The described way of earning SEUs is definitely a cheap one, but some investment can still not be avoided. It will cost you either your working hours as the event of the Scrum User Group (e.g. Agile Breakfast in Zurich) takes place during the day on a normal working day, or it will cost you your leisure time, if the agile event is organized in the evening or on a weekend. User Groups Events are mostly free of charge, but conferences are not.

The main question is still not how to get the 70 SEUs, but if these 70 SEUs make one a Scrum Professional? Will one be able to convince the Scrum Alliance, that these 70 or 54 SEUs have helped me on? What is the use of collecting SEUs? How can one become a real Scrum expert?

Actually, one should indeed have some other learning objectives as the number of hours spent on learning. In collaboration with other certified trainers and coaches, we have defined for us what skills belong to a professional Scrum user and created a unique training program for Certified Scrum Professional candidates - https://www.dasscrumteam.com/training/CertifiedScrumProfessional. If you look at its description and see that you share our vision of Scrum professionalism, then you automatically get a number of learning objectives and topics that can serve you as an orientation during the process of earning SEUs. Or maybe you even get the support of your employer and decide to participate in our program (6 training dates, 2 days each, spread over a half of the year) ...

Yuliya Mijuk

About the author

Yuliya Mijuk

Yuliya’s professional life started with Scrum. She is a Certified Scrum Professional and received her certification as ScrumMasters in 2006. She studied Computational Linguistics at the LMU in Munich. After the graduation in 2004 she came to WEB.DE where the transition to Scrum was taking place. Later on Yuliya worked as a ScrumMaster and Scrum Coach at SPRiNT iT and billiger.de (solute GmbH).

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