Product certificate recommendations

  • 9 December 2022
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H
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What professional courses/certifications have you found most helpful as a Product Professional? I’m curious to hear thoughts from all roles (PM, PMM, UX, Prod Ops) 😊 Thanks in advance! 

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scott.baldwin
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Anything particular you’re going to learn about?

Head of Community & Product Evangelism
david.morgan
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What professional courses/certifications have you found most helpful as a Product Professional? I’m curious to hear thoughts from all roles (PM, PMM, UX, Prod Ops) 😊 Thanks in advance! 

Hey Hannah, 

Anecdotally speaking, I find that there’s always a blend of “helpful” courses and “business” courses. Personally, I’m not much of a fan of the certifications that you simply need to meet a coach in a hotel conference room for 6 hours without showing any practical use or even an exam.

I did take the 280 Group/AIPMM “Certified Product Manager” course a few years ago. The perk here was that my “marketing” side of Product Management was severely lacking and the course really gave me a good footprint to expand my insights on that side of product management. 

As @scott.baldwin asked, if you can give us a few of the courses/certifications you’re looking at we might be able to give better feedback. Between Udemy, Coursera, books, and various PM groups (like this one!) - there’s a smorgasbord of courses, webinars, discussions, and chats that can be helpful for professional development. A lot of things are “learned as you go” and these courses genuinely just give you the soft skills and insights on how to navigate situations once you’ve encountered them (trust me, you’ll encounter most of them haha…. in a good way, I mean it!). 

 

martinmichalik
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Hello @Hannah ODonnell,

as other mentioned it really depends on what you want o learn & what is the stage of your career. From my own experience, the certifications are waste of time and money as they rarely have any impact on your career (and I personally believe you should avoid organizations where they have impact as these orgs care more about paper rather than your skills, but that’s just my opinion).

Again annectotaly speaking, I would invest your time into 3 areas:

  • understanding business finance (any introduction course on the free online universities should do)
  • understanding product and UX design
  • undestanding user research

Investing in these areas will push your capability to execute in the PM role significantly higher. Most importantly, as @david.morgan mentioned, I really believe the only way how to become a better PM is execute in the the PM role (or adjacent one) and learn from the peers and the situations as you encounter them.

Nonetheless, I heard some positive reviews about Pragmatic Institute, but that’s going to cost you fortune and I personally don’t have any experience with that.

JeannetteC
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I agree with all of the above - it’s brilliant that there are so many sources  available at just the click of your mouse and really really good books too.

Of course it does depend on what specific areas you want to develop in.

Not sure if these are of interest but thought I’d share, just in case, some time ago I did the Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) certification (by ScrumAlliance) which I found really useful as first steps into the product world, working in a SCRUM team.

ScrumAlliance also offer more advanced courses too: Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO) and Certified Scrum Professional Product Owner (CSP-PO)

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