Agile training teaches participants to use agile approaches to build solutions incrementally, get feedback regularly and deliver value throughout rather than in a big bang delivery at the end. Agile succeeds over traditional or waterfall ways of working by featuring close customer collaboration, small and self-managing teams and timeboxed iterations.

Agile training is based on the Agile Manifesto – a set of 4 Values and 12 Principles that form the basis of agile ways of working. 

Agile training covers a wide range of training courses that fall under the umbrella of agile. These courses are typically focused on a specific audience or role and are intended to help participants adopt agile ways of working.

Watch for agile training courses that include professional certification. The most common professional certification is Scrum since Scrum is the most popular agile technique in use today. Scrum training courses that provide professional certification typically cover the roles of  Scrum Master, Product Owner, Leaders and Team Members.

The Project Management Institute provides professional certification training for the Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM), and the Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM).

Other agile training programs include Kanban, Lean and scaling approaches like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scrum of Scrums (SoS). Some of those courses include professional certification.

Agile training has a significant payback. For teams that are not using agile ways of working, learning about agile and Scrum and how to apply them can lead to increased productivity, better alignment and faster delivery of value. Training for teams that are using “agilish” approaches has great payback as well because frequently teams are misusing agile or following a process blindly – sometimes this is called Zombie Scrum. For more on this topic, check out our post, Why you need agile training

Agile training helps teams to:

• Respond to changing customer needs
• Leverage basic and advanced agile concepts to improve productivity
• Use customer feedback to deliver the best solutions in the shortest time
• Promote team communication and collaboration and avoid thrashing
• Speak the same language and follow a common agile process
• Understand how agile team roles maximize team productivity
• Onboard new team members quickly
• Leverage retrospectives to continually improve team performance
• Unlearn ineffective practices and beliefs that hold teams back
• Select the most effective agile approaches based on the team context

Agile Training helps organizations to:

• Improve customer satisfaction and improve sales or product adoption
• Deliver customer value faster

• Retain top performers
• Align teams to organizational value streams and goals
• Optimize organizational structures and make the most effective use of employees
• Develop leaders who engage and inspire
• Facilitate and support an agile transformation

Agile Training helps individuals to:

• Better understand expectations
• Apply agile techniques and improve personal effectiveness
• Gain expertise, agile certification and improve personal marketability

An Agile Training Plan outlines the goals, audiences and needs, timeframe and costs for agile training. Learn about how to make the best use of your training budget using our recommended plans for agile training in How to Develop Your Agile Training Plan.

Anyone who wants to maximize the productivity gains from agile ways of working should take training. This is most important for those who help teams adopt agile such as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. Second most important would be agile team members, Product Owners and managers, and leaders in the organization. Managers and leaders are often overlooked in training and that is a mistake because they have the greatest influence on whether agile teams are able to be productive with agile and Scrum.

Agile training is important because without it, teams tend to misuse agile terms and concepts or waste valuable time thrashing. Agile training will help to get the team aligned on a common set of terms and processes.

See our related post Yes You Really Do Need to Invest in Agile & Scrum Training – Here’s Why which outlines the following 6 reasons that agile training is important:
1. Without training, you have all the costs and none of the benefits
2. Avoid Confusion and Thrashing
3. Unlearning What Doesn’t Work
4. Avoiding the Mish-Mash of Mixed Agile Approaches
5. Poor Agile and Bad Scrum Harms Other Teams and Becomes the Standard
6. To Facilitate Change and Continuous Improvement

Agile training costs vary widely depending on geographic location, delivery method and whether the course includes certification.

In the US, costs for an onsite private class run about $17,000 for a 2-day Professional Scrum Master course that includes Scrum certification for up to 24 people. Costs for one individual to join a 2-day public offering of Professional Scrum Product Owner runs about $1,295 while the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master course runs about $1,000.

Self-paced online training courses that do not include certification, such as our Agile and Scrum for Teams Course are about $200 for a 2-day course.

There are a few 3-day courses such as the Applying Professional Scrum – Software Developers and the Agile for Practitioner Courses. These are delivered over 4 days at 6 hours per day, or extended to 2 evenings per week over 4 weeks in the case of the latter. [/sc_fs_faq]There is no standard course length for agile training though most certification courses are 2-day in length. During the pandemic, many of these courses are delivered via Zoom and broken into 3 days of 5 hours or 4 days of 4 hours to avoid Zoom fatigue. This would include Scrum certification courses like the Professional Scrum Master, Professional Scrum Product Owner, or Disciplined Agile Scrum Master.

There are a few 3-day courses such as the Applying Professional Scrum – Software Developers and the Agile for Practitioner Course which is linked to the PMI-ACP exam. These are delivered over 4 days at 6 hours per day, or extended to 2 evenings per week over 4 weeks in the case of the latter.