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Agile Marketing Certification

Agile Marketing Certification

I’m happy to report that we now have Agile Marketing certification.  We identified this as a need last year at the Sprint One event, and now thanks to the folks at IC Agile, as well as the hard work of Yuval Yeret, Andrea Fryrear of Agile Sherpas and yours truly, we have a certification.  It will take a little while before instructors and organizations get accredited, but you should soon see both public and private courses offering Agile Marketing certification later this year. 

I know this is something that I’ve heard as a need from many early adopters of Agile Marketing, so I’m very glad to let you know that certification for Agile marketers is here.

The target audience for Agile Marketing certification is primarily Agile practitioners and first level managers.  This is not training for Chief Marketing Officers (although I’m sure they’d also learn a lot) or executives.  It is also appropriate for Agile coaches or scrum masters who have a marketing background and are looking to extend their practice to the marketing function.

If you want to get a sense of the Agile Marketing certification, the complete learning outcomes are available from IC Agile.  Each provider of training for this certification will create their own materials to address these outcomes, so every course will be different, but all should address these learning outcomes.  IC Agile ensures that each organization and each trainer are held to a high bar, both in terms of the material and in terms of their delivery capabilities.

The Agile Marketing certification classes must be designed to be deeply experiential and interactive.  Instructors must have plenty of exercises, not simply sit up at the front of the room and present slides.  Participants must be able to demonstrate their knowledge of both the why and the what: why agile marketing, what is agile marketing, and what methods and practices (Scrum, Kanban) are used to achieve Agility.

Agile Marketing certification is not a substitute for Certified Scrum Master or any of the other certifications offered by the Scrum Alliance. Some people in a marketing organization, particularly those who serve as scrum masters or coaches, will want to get certified by the Scrum Alliance.  Those courses, however, are not designed for marketers, and they don’t prepare the average marketer to apply Scrum, for example, to the marketing practice.  This certification is designed to provide that translation of the Agile concepts to marketing.

Here is the basic outline of the learning outcomes for Agile Marketing Certification:

  1. Why Agile Marketing? What are the critical drivers that necessitate marketers be more agile?
  2. What is Agile Marketing? What are the key principles and values of the Agile Marketing Manifesto? How is it different from reactive, real-time marketing?
  3. The importance of being customer-centric in Agile Marketing.  Understanding customer needs and delivering value, both for the customer and for the business.
  4. Implementing Agile Marketing.  Focusing on outcomes over outputs. Achieving outcomes through backlogs and stories, and through adaptive learning and iteration.
  5. Teams and teamwork in Agile Marketing. How to work in cross-functional teams.  How to achieve improved collaboration, both within the team and across teams (and agencies).
  6. Iteration-based approaches like Scrum and flow-based approaches like Kanban.  How do they work in the marketing context?  Which is better for certain kinds of work?  Can you combine them?
  7. Creating a culture of experimentation and validated learning.  Using data to inform decision making.
  8. Agile Marketing in practice, including case studies and a plan to adopt Agile Marketing

I’m really looking forward to getting accredited myself and seeing lots of other people getting accredited.  Agile Marketing certification is an important step forward for the Agile Marketing community.