I got my Certified Scrum Master certification a little over a year ago, and I recently got an email from the Scrum Alliance asking whether I had been studying Scrum. This is what the email body looked like:

Truthfully I wasn’t doing anything in particular besides reading articles I came across on places like HackerNews, but seeing the “Total SEUs Required to Renew” of 20 and “SEUs You Have Earned So Far” of 0, made me think that maybe I should be. Reading over this email it was unclear to me how I get these credits, I just knew that somehow I needed to. A quick Google search trying to find an immediate answer didn’t turn up any hard results. So I added it to my backlog of things that I will look at when I have the time.

Eventually I sat down and thought, “ok I have to figure this out so I have time to complete it before my certification expires next May”. I went to the Scrum Alliance website, reset my password, and logged into my personal dashboard. Here I see the 20 Scrum Education Units (SEUs) that I need in order to renew next year. From there I poked around on the main dashboard page thinking there were courses available that I could take and count towards my credits. What they have listed there under “Search Courses” and “Find Courses” ended up being additional certifications you could get through Scrum Alliance. I figured they had to have free material somewhere on the site. Under “Find Courses” there is another section with a button that says “Start Today”, this is actually where the free material is.

The Scrum Alliance website links you to a resources section called Learning Journey courses, which is where you can go to take short courses that will count towards your SEU credits. Each course tells you how many credits you earn for completing the content. I have bookmarked several of these. It also says on the website you can also earn SEU credits by volunteering, reading articles and attending events. When I think of how I could use my Scrum skills for volunteering nothing comes to mind, but I will start counting the articles I read about Scrum towards my SEU credits. There is also an option to attend events, but when I looked at the events they have posted on their website, there were very few and none of them were in the United States.

The requirements for renewing the CSM cert were surprisingly hard to track down, but now I know what I need to do ad what is expected after future tests.