You are more than welcome to attend a Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master (CSP-SM) course without having done an Advanced Certified Scrum Master course, but we wouldn’t advise it.
The reason for that is that you won’t be able to be certified as a Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master by the Scrum Alliance unless you are already an Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM).
The Advanced Certified Scrum Master course was created to bridge the gap between the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) course and the Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master course.
After a year of experience as a Scrum Master, delegates are invited to attend the Advanced Certified Scrum Master course and have their skills validated as well as learn new skills, tools, and techniques.
The CSM course focuses on teaching people how to become a Scrum Master and how to understand the various roles of a Scrum Team whereas the Advanced Certified Scrum Master course focuses on helping you straddle the role of Scrum Master and Agile coach within your organisation.
The ACSM course helps put Agile frameworks and the Agile movement in context, empowering you to understand why these frameworks were developed and what problems they addressed.
It also helps to bring a more advanced set of skills into play for Scrum Masters that will help them to deal with increased complexity within Scrum and product development environments.
An ACSM course helps prepare Scrum Masters for the dual role of professional Scrum Master and Agile coach, with emphasis on how to better serve the development team, the product owner, and beyond the scrum team.
The Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master course is designed to build on the foundation skills and expertise of an Advanced Certified Scrum Master and prepare them to be a professional Scrum Master and Agile coach.
It will provide you with the necessary insight, knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to perform at an elite level within the scrum team and organisation. It does require that you have a minimum of 2 years’ of experience working within a professional environment.
Without that experience and the associated skills, the course will simply be too hard for you to grasp nor will you be able to implement what you have learned in the course.
So, in summary, you can attend the CSP-SM course without having attended an ACSM course but we wouldn’t advise that you do.
If you are interested in growing your career as a Scrum Master, visit our Advanced Certified Scrum Master course page as well as our Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master course page.
If you like the idea of having a mentored and coach-driven approach to your skills development, visit our Agile Coach Academy page.
If you are interested in incorporating coaching into your current Scrum Master skillset, visit our on-demand Introduction to Coaching course.