ACP Certification – Agile Certified Professional – is a certification from PMI (Project Management Institute, the industry-standard for project management certifications) that shows you have all the knowledge you need to manage with the Agile Framework in mind. As I had been working in the Product Owner capacity (bascially the project manager) for a couple years at my job with no formal training, I decided getting official certification when I was off on my own would be important. So I did some research to see what this would involve.
In order to take the test, one must first apply for it on the PMI website, and meet a certain amount of qualifications:
1. A high school diploma, secondary degree or associate’s degree
2. 2000 hours working in a team in projects
3. Worked for 1500 hours on teams that used agile methodology
4. 21 hours in approved training on agile practices
Once you apply and fill in all the information (this is quite tedious), you then wait to see if you get accepted, or audited. Right now I am waiting to be accepted. When you do get accepted, you then pay for and schedule the test.
There are different online self-guided training courses a person can take, or live online leader-lead course, or even in-person classes. Most of them take up about two days of classes, and cost goes up depending on your choice. For me, I am trying the most low-cost option first (self-guided) to see if that is enough.
I currently have two days planned of training (to meet my 21 hour requirement, I already checked that the training I selected is approved by PMI), then I plan to study a few more days, take a couple batches of “test” exams, and then hope to take my exam a few weeks later.
The exam is a three hour, in-person or online exam with 120 multiple-choice questions, and costs $439 for members of PMI (which I am). Yikes! Wish me luck!
