Last week two things happened on LinkedIn that made me open a spreadsheet instead of writing my usual post.
The CEO of PMI — the Project Management Institute, the biggest certification body in the industry — published a post celebrating Agile's 25th anniversary. In it, he cited a stat from PMI's own research: 85% of organizations say agility is critical, but only 32% are satisfied. A 53-point gap.
I asked one question: what does the new manifesto offer that the previous ones didn't?
He edited his response. Accused a four-follower account of self-promotion. Deleted my comment.
Same week, Jeff Sutherland — the co-creator of Scrum — posted about Scrum at Tesla. I engaged. He told me that 65% of Scrum teams are late, over budget, with unhappy customers. His explanation: they haven't implemented the protocol correctly.
Not "maybe there's a design flaw." Just: two out of three users are wrong.
So I followed the money. And everything started making sense.
The Numbers
Nobody publishes these together. I wonder why.
- Scrum.org: 1.17 million certifications issued. PSM I exam: $200. Most people also pay $1,000-$1,500 for a course.
- Scrum Alliance: 1.5 million certified members. Training mandatory. CSM courses: $250 to $2,495. Expires every 2 years.
- Scaled Agile (SAFe): 2 million+ trained. Courses: $500-$1,500. Cert expires every year. Renewal: $295 per cert.
- PMI: 1 million+ PMP holders. Exam: $555 (non-member). Revenue: $200M+/year. They're a nonprofit.
That's over 5 million certifications from four organizations.
The enterprise agile transformation market — training, coaching, consulting, tooling — is valued at $49 billion. Growing 18.5% annually. Projected to hit $96 billion by 2029.
For a methodology that its own inventor says fails 65% of the time.
The Renewal Machine
This is the part that radicalized me.
Your CS degree doesn't expire in 12 months. Your bar exam doesn't require attending bar-branded webinars. But in Agile world:
SAFe certs die every year. $295 to renew. You don't retake any exam. You don't prove new competence. You pay. The badge stays. You don't pay. The badge greys out on LinkedIn. That's the entire mechanism.
Scrum Alliance certs die every two years. Renewed through "Scrum Education Units" — earned by consuming Scrum Alliance content, attending Scrum Alliance events, taking Scrum Alliance courses.
PMI certs die every three years. Renewed through "Professional Development Units" — earned through PMI courses, PMI events, PMI publications.
Create credential → expire it → require your ecosystem for renewal → extract forever.
It's not education. It's SaaS with a lanyard.
The CSM Reality Check
The Certified ScrumMaster — the most popular entry cert in the industry, over a million holders — works like this:
- 16 hours of training (two days)
- 50-question exam, 74% to pass
- Open book
- The book is The Scrum Guide. It's 14 pages.
I've written incident reports longer than the source material for this certification. The README for some open-source libraries has more substance.
Price: up to $2,495.
Compare: CompTIA Security+. Months of study. Six domains. Hundreds of topics. Closed-book. Proctored. About $404.
One certifies you can protect infrastructure from real threats. The other certifies you didn't fall asleep during a two-day workshop about a pamphlet.
The market prices them similarly because the market isn't buying competence. It's buying a checkbox on a job posting.
Why It Never Gets Simpler
When revenue depends on certification volume, simplification is a financial threat.
SAFe went from one framework in 2011 to 20+ certification tracks today. Scrum Alliance launched "AI for Scrum Masters" microcredentials. PMI acquired Disciplined Agile in 2019 for its cert potential — DA adoption promptly dropped from 7% to 4% and existing cert holders got burned.
The answer to a 65% failure rate is never "simplify." It's always "sell more."
What Actually Ships
I watched a six-person team at a payments company ship a regulatory compliance module in eleven weeks. No SAFe. No Agile coach. No release train engineer at $400/hour. One senior engineer who could say no, a product manager with customers' phone numbers saved in his personal phone, and a CI/CD pipeline that caught problems at 2am.
The team running SAFe in the same building didn't ship on time.
None of what worked required a $1,500 course. None of it expires annually. None of it needs Scrum Education Units to remain valid.
There's no recurring revenue in "hire experienced people and let them work." But there's $49 billion in "your people need our badge to be effective."
The Gap Is The Product
The question I asked the CEO of PMI was simple: if 85% say agility is critical and only 32% are satisfied, what does the new manifesto fix?
He deleted it because the honest answer kills the business model.
The 53-point gap isn't a problem. It's the market. If satisfaction ever reached 85%, there'd be nothing left to sell. PMI needs the gap. Scrum Alliance needs the gap. SAFe needs the gap.
Closing the gap would bankrupt the industry that claims to be working on closing it.
When you follow the money, the deleted comments and the blamed users stop being confusing. They're just good business.
Full data breakdown and the complete PMI CEO exchange: agilelie.com/blog/certification-economy
Curious if anyone else has done this math. Or if you've seen the renewal machine up close.
Benjamin Castell is diving into the gap between what the Agile industry sells and what engineering teams actually need. Follow at agilelie.com.
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