In this article, we are going to talk about SAFe Agile Training but let’s begin with the origin of agile methodologies first.
In the past few years, project management practices have been evolving dramatically. Any observant of technology trends, would see the impact of agile project management on the information technology industry and beyond. Agile Practices came to the light through the emerging software development practices. Due to the ongoing challenges of waterfall practices in delivering workable products with relative speed, new solutions were needed to satisfy the naturally changing needs of this industry. Thus, software development companies sought out rapid delivery, quick outcomes, and agility to adapt to ever-changing requirements. Accordingly, the need for more agile ways of delivering projects increased where the emphasis on end to end robust planning became less relevant. Also, the need for a more agile approach became imminent.
The Birth of Agile Manifesto
The ongoing Agile trend shined in 2001 after a meeting to discuss the software development pressing matters. In this meeting, a group of software development professionals gathered for the first time to discuss these challenges. The meeting led to the discussion over how agile practices can help to face these challenges. Accordingly, the meeting outcome came in the form of an agreement over agile values and principles called the Agile Manifesto. The agile core values and principles formulate the Agile mindset which changed the playground of project delivery in the software development industry. Then the following success of many agile practices spread the agile practices to other similar industries.
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This success opened the door to more agile practices to emerge, these practices also include SAFe. Scaled agile framework or SAFe in short is one of the most recognized agile frameworks. In addition, its certifications started to gain global attraction due to the framework’s appealing tools and techniques.
SAFe Agile Training – Trending Agile Certification
So what is SAFe? SAFe is an integrated framework of multiple practices, principles, and competencies which aims to achieve business agility. SAFe is an enterprise lean group of methodologies comprises of multiple frameworks and methodologies including Lean, Agile, and DevOps. As SAFe is an enterprise framework, the value of SAFe would be achieved on the enterprise level. In order to achieve this value, SAFe focuses on seven core enterprise competencies. These competencies are critical success factors to achieve and sustain enterprise competitive advantage. These seven core competencies include the following:
Lean-Agile Leadership:
The art of applying Lean-Agile leadership to lead and maintain organizational changes through the empowerment of teams and employees so that they achieve their full potential. You can read more in the Scrum Master Certification post.
Team and Technical Agility
Developing the proper agile behaviors within teams in addition to technical practices.
Agile Product Delivery
The intentional build-up of high performing teams. This can be achieved through teams that use design thinking and champions customer-centricity. Thus, providing an ongoing stream of valuable products through the application of DevOps, Release on Demand, and Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
Enterprise Solution Delivery
Building large solutions that integrate different components of the software, networks, applications, and physical components.
Lean Portfolio Management
The ability to formulate a portfolio vision and develop a portfolio strategy. In addition to the ability to create portfolios charters, creating their visions, and developing their lean budgets. Also, being able to develop portfolio prioritization and road mapping mechanisms.
Organizational Agility
The ability to apply Lean approaches in addition to systems thinking methods to enterprise strategy. In addition, applying these approaches to investment funding as well as governance.
Continuous Learning Culture
The ability to increasing the enterprise knowledge, overall competences, as well as performance Continually. The enterprise can achieve this by committing to relentless never-ending learning, improvement, and innovation.
Agile certifications
If you want to grow and advance in your career, you need to upgrade your skills with agile skills. According to recent market trends, it is suggested that for an Agile career, you don’t only need to acquire agile knowledge but also obtain certification. There are many certifications available for the Agile and Scrum frameworks. These certifications besides SAFe Agile Training are considered an asset for many companies when it comes to talent acquisition.
As a result, these companies prefer candidates who attended SAFe Agile Training and prefer even more agile certified candidates. On the other hand, SAFe among other certification bodies only allows candidates who attended SAFe Agile Training in order to set for certifications exam. Or at least highly recommend it in other certification bodies cases. It is a necessity for those who aspire to obtain SAFe Agilist certification to attend SAFe Agile Training. Learn more in the Scrum Master Course Online post.
SAFe Agile Training is not just an instructional training that can increase your knowledge of SAFe. In addition to growing your knowledge, SAFe Agile Training provides you with practical sessions that can sharpen your experience.
Consequently, hiring managers are feeling that getting agile certificates helps them in their work with exposure to teamwork, multi-functional contacts, and as a leader in product ownership. Agile refers to the ability to move easily. In other words, it is a skill of adaptation and development based on changing situations.
Agile methodologies include an iterative approach that allows flexibility, realism, and collaboration in delivering the product. It prioritizes interactions on processes, dynamics over fixed and practical plans over documents. It tries to achieve the project goal by dividing it into smaller outputs and assigning teams to achieve it. This, in turn, allows customers to constantly monitor and verify progress, which allows continuous cooperation and feedback.
Benefits of SAFe Framework
Agile Framework (SAFe®) helps companies tackle the major challenges of developing and delivering enterprise-level programs and systems in the shortest sustainable time. It’s a free online exposed knowledge base of proven success patterns for people building the world’s most important software and systems.
SAFe helps companies in their journey of adaptation to their own business needs through its scalability and reconfigurable. It supports smaller solutions that employ 50 to 125 practitioners, as well as complex systems that require thousands of people. A wide range of knowledge, SAFe describes the roles, responsibilities, artifacts, and activities needed to implement Lean-Agile development. As a result of this, SAFe Agile Training is now trending and its popularity is growing significantly every day.
Since there are as many agile and project management certifications and training other than SAFe Agile Training. Thus, they may all have some common benefits for all of these non SAFe and SAFe Agile Training courses and certifications. On the other hand, there are more specific benefits for SAFe Agile Training and certification. These benefits are detailed in the following section:
Increased demand for certified practitioners
These days all industries are in a race to implement agile frameworks, methodologies, and tools. Along with this race, many of the aspiring companies to adopt agile culture fails to hire practitioners due to their scarcity. In such an intense race, getting accreditation will help you become a target talent for these candidates. And here is why these companies have to adopt one of two strategies:
- Hire long term agile consultants and work towards building up agile capabilities through providing excessive SAFe Agile Training to its potential employees. This option is extremely expensive in terms of cost and time, at the same time companies still have to mix its pool of talents by hiring external readily certified and SAFe Agile Training holders. The later is essential for the success of the adoption.
- Fully depend on external SAFe Agile Training holders and SAFe Agile Training certified agilists to speed up the agile adoption process.
Proof of your credentials
If you hold an Agile degree, you will not have to waste your time proving your employer and peers skills. Your degree will do it for you. It also exposes you as a person committed to learning and improving one’s skills. Holding SAFe Agile Training certification will make it easier for you to convince employers with your SAFe agile capabilities.
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Expanding knowledge and skill
SAFe is not just another agile methodology like Scrum that may work for one company and doesn’t work for another. Or work for one vertical of the company while fails to provide value in other sections. SAFe is a safe inclusive road map and framework that proven success in shifting companies’ culture to agile. Thus, SAFe Agile Training is a mandatory need in order for you to gain a sufficient level of knowledge for this sophisticated framework. Forget about these cliches of one size fits all scrum gags, or planning the unknown perfection dream of the waterfall. SAFe is down to a business framework that looks for what would potentially work and do it. This makes just getting the knowledge without examination is just another way of branding rather than building real expertise.
A door for the next level
If you are a passionate person and looking for the next step in your career ladder, SAFe Agile Training & certification can serve as an add-on. This will help you stand out from the crowd and promote yourself better. Moreover, it will allow you to connect with other licensed professionals to discover opportunities and build your skills.
Increase your salary payment
In the first point, we made clear the need for agile certified professionals. There is a high demand from the companies participating in the agile race for those professionals. Thus, this competition over scarce talents with agile skills makes companies offer much higher wages when compared to the payment for non SAFe Agile Training holders. According to estimations, SAFe Agile Training and certification holders’ salaries may range from $ 100,000 to $ 120,000. Certainly, the importance of SAFe Agile reflects on you as a candidate because it represents a value to these companies and great importance to them, and we will explain in detail the importance of SAFe Agile for companies.
How SAFe Agile helps companies?
Rapid adaptation to technological changes and economic conditions is a critical factor for success across all organizations. The challenges came in the form of monitoring, control, communication, change management, and many more. Introducing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) helped teams maintain alignment with business goals and maintain balance in time, cost, and scope. Thus the framework improves the results for many organizations around the world. Below we have detailed the ways SAFe helps organizations improve:
Quality
For companies to rapidly develop and deliver to changing business environments, they depend on quality. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has built-in quality practices that ensure rapid flow across all levels and teams. Building on stable environments is crucial for large enterprises without quality assurance, excessive rework and slow speeds will lead to unacceptable results. This build-up requires extensive and excessive SAFe Agile Training for company employees and certifying some of them.
Productivity
Another pillar that Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) helps elevating within a company is productivity. SAFe works towards aligning different teams with the product, and creates ongoing collaboration. Through the increased knowledge and understanding of SAFe either through continuous SAFe Agile Training or the SAFe framework promotion. This way SAFe offers different teams a high level of visibility and makes them clearly understand the results. Thus, SAFe helps in setting the expectations of stakeholders and increase transparency between teams. As a result of this clear understanding, balance on assigned work, and transparency to the customer level greatly increases the work and overall productivity.
Team-centered environment
The Agile Team is a multi-functional and self-organizing team to plan, implement, and accomplish work against organizational goals. The teams at Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) have a clear vision of what they want to achieve and are passionate about the vision because they have been involved in creating it. Open communication and transparency develop positive relationships that lead to more collaboration and an environment where teams thrive. Trained SAFe Agile teams tend to provide more inputs in the direction of the vision.
The shortest time to reach the market
The use of Scaled agile frameworks allows companies to deliver value to the market quickly. Batch workloads and reduced batch sizes to move work quickly and repeatedly through programs. Increasing productivity and delivering value that will in turn lead to measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and team participation. SAFe focuses on building the agile culture rather than drive it through teams. Through the build-up of SAFe Agile Training trained teams and the promotion of SAFe culture in the company, this becomes easier to achieve. As a result, the company to reduce the time it takes to go to market with its new products.
Specific
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) delivers specific concepts and practices for use by teams to develop programs. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) specifically focuses on how to use agile and flexible software development practices. Teams go along with a common mission. Focuses on the same purpose to produce high-quality programs and all customer-centric energy.
Transparency
As we mentioned earlier in this section, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) offers a wide view of the agile project and change management. This view crosses the boundaries, breaks silos, and facilitates communication within the company. Transparency generates the confidence necessary for development, innovation, and continuous improvement. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) applications and practices help organizations deliver value. It also increases customer satisfaction, creates a more productive environment, predicts future events, and increases time to market. SAFe encourages companies to track their implementation of SAFe and adding a reporting layer for each level. Thus, it gives career communication across the entire company. KPIs, goals, and best-practice reports allow the company management to understand the processes that need improvement.
Scaled SAFe Agilist Certification Requirements
The requirements for Scaled SAFe Agilist Certification are straight forward. This includes having at least 5+ years of work experience. These years of work experience can be in software development or software testing as well as business analysis. At the same time, product or project management experience is welcome too. In addition to the 5+ years of work experience, experience in working with Scrum is also required. These are the key perquisites for the certification, still, there is another requirement in order for you to be able to sit for the Safe Agilist exam. This requirement involves attending a SAFe agile training course. Achieving all of these requirements doesn’t grant you the certification by default as you still need to pass the Scaled SAFe Agilist exam. On the other hand, attending SAFe agile training will help you prepare for the SAFe Agilist exam as well.
Our Free Agile Scrum Training describes the Agile and Scrum foundations and different Agile and Scrum Certification options in detail. Enroll in our Free Agile Training now.
Benefits of SAFe Agile Training Online
Online courses are the art of transferring knowledge via the Internet, from anywhere in the world to the learners. Also, some of the certificates and certificates that can be provided to give the candidates their comprehensible ability are highly appreciated by many companies. Thus, SAFe Agile Training Online helps learners to gain knowledge faster and easier. SAFe Agile Training Online has a wide range of benefits that can help improve your career. These benefits include:
Flexibility
Emerging technologies force professionals to adapt to the fast-paced updates and requires them to keep up this pace all the time. Continuous learning is the only way to achieve this goal. Working a 9-5 job and taking courses is stressful adding to it going to a training center before or after work. Going to a training center can steal your weekend and consume your free time.
In that case, you can take the Online SAFe Agile Training course at any time from anywhere. You only need an internet connection and a smart platform like your laptop, tablet, or even your smartphone. What is more, you can spend your time during a coffee break at work, sitting on your couch, and taking your online SAFe Agile Training. You can even attend online SAFe Agile Training while moving to and from work. Flexibility in terms of time and place is way easier with SAFe Agile Training online.
Learners community
Online SAFe Agile Training courses usually involve offer learners community. People with similar interests or similar learning goals may join a community that actively interacts and exchanges questions, doubts, and ideas. Participation in such groups may provide a more detailed look at where the course leads.
Online support
SAFe Agile Training online also in most cases offers professional instructors for learner support. This helps you as a learner to be always on top of your learning by having your questions answered at any time. Your online instructors interact with your questions allowing you to get almost an instant answer to them.
Progress report
Most of the online courses involve sample exam questions that test your understanding of the topics you have covered so far. Usually, you can retake the test exam questions after reviewing the parts you haven’t completely understood. Also, most of SAFe Agile Training online courses usually provide you with how far you have progressed in the course. This helps you estimate your time to finish the course and accelerate or slow your pace accordingly.
Retention of information
SAFe Agile Training Online courses help learners memorize and remember information with attractive images, videos, clear lines, movie clips, animated descriptions, and more. Real-life examples are also given to explain the concepts better. Presenting information in well-crafted ways leads to a better understanding of the learning content than taking notes with pen and paper. Face-to-face coaching led by coaches can force trainees to deviate from topics due to lengthy lectures, where speech is the main means of communication.
Constructive feedback
Most of the SAFe Agile Training online courses provide feedback through short tests. These test questions provide trainees with the ability to understand their position in terms of knowledge. Multiple-choice questions are better for learners to take the test. Answer feedback alongside the answer justification gives the trainees the opportunity to return and correct themselves upon error. This saves time and effort when compared to unit tests as papers are sent to the teacher to correct errors and give the final score.
SAFe Agilist Exam
To obtain a SAFe Agilist certification is you have to take the SAFe training course. This is a requirement, as attending the course provides access to all study and examination materials. However, attending the course does not guarantee passing the exam. As we explained before, the successful completion of the SAFe Agile Training course is needed in order to sit for the exam.
Still, you will need to pass a SAFe Agilist test with a minimum score of 34 out of 45 (75%) for SA4. While 35 out of 45 (77%) for SA5. That’s why it is important for you to take the practice exam several times until you get 100%. The exam format is in the form of multiple-choice, the test is web-based (Single Browser) and it is a closed book exam. Furthermore, the exam duration is 90 minutes complete and the number of questions is 45 questions. Also, it is worth mentioning that the exam language is English.
Summary SAFe Agile Training
We have covered extensively the SAFe Agile Training details giving you a complete view of the importance of SAFe Agile training and certification. Also, we have covered the benefits of SAFe Agile Training. In addition, we have explained why SAFe Agile Training is trendy and how it can help companies adopt the agile culture.
At the same time, we provided the benefits of online SAFe Agile Training and how it appeals to full-time employees. Online SAFe Agile Training courses have a wide range of benefits that exceeds the obvious benefits. However, we must not forget that some people prefer face-to-face SAFe Agile Training while others may prefer online training. Let’s also not forget the current Covid19 situation which mandated social distancing and remote interactions. This makes online SAFe Agile Training the only option in such a situation. Hence when you consider the benefits of online SAFe Agile Training already offers, these make it the preferred option.
Our Free Agile Scrum Training describes the Agile and Scrum foundations and different Agile and Scrum Certification options in detail. Enroll in our Free Agile Training now.
According to the American Association for Training and Development, nearly a third of e-learning content and materials are available and tracked online. There is no doubt that online training is a huge cost saver for organizations and individuals, as only certificate courses come at a high price compared to the free online courses. Using the Internet to improve your skills is the best way to climb the ladder of success, as the best possible investment you can make is to invest in yourself.