CEC — News — Agile Moose

Finally – Shining a Light on Badass Agile Coaches

I’ve been a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) since 2012. It’s one of two coaching certification levels, the other is Certified Team Coach (CTC), which are sponsored by the Scrum Alliance as part of their guide-level certifications. The other guide level is the Certified Scrum Trainer (CST).

Over the years, I’ve been frustrated with the Scrum Alliance because they’ve done a mediocre-to-poor job of shining a light on the CEC & CTC coaching communities. As of this writing, there are 140 CEC’s and 237 CTC’s in the world, compared to 277 CST’s.

The Scrum Alliance has always leaned more heavily into supporting the CST’s. My guess is because of the part they play in granting certifications and driving revenue. But that being said, and I’m probably a wee bit biased, I’ve always felt that the coaches are equally as or even more critical to achieving the overarching goals of the Alliance than the CST’s.

I can hear you ask—but Bob, if you’re so frustrated, why have you continued with your CEC certification?

Agile Coaches need MORE than Coaching Skills

I earned my CEC (Certified Enterprise Coach) certification with the Scrum Alliance in 2012. I’d applied in 2011, so it took me about a year to go through the process at the time. If my memory is right, I believe I was about the 43rd CEC at the time.

I did a search of CEC’s and CTC’s on May 26th and it showed 118 and 156 worldwide respectively. That’s ~300 coaches. The growth of CEC’s over an ~8-year period was ~10/year.

I had been serving in leadership and agile coaching roles for quite a few years prior to that. I’d also been part of a couple of fairly successful agile transformations at the organizational level. So, while I was confident in my coaching capabilities, I was excited to go through the process as a way of validating my journey, experiences, and skills.

Back then, the focus was on the breadth of your stances.