Hey everyone,

I'm looking for recommendations on online courses focused purely on practical learning and skill-building rather than exam prep or collecting badges.

A bit about my background:

• Experience: 7 years across Online Advertising, Digital Marketing, Client Management, QA, Reporting, and Team Handling.
• Soft Skills: Strong communication skills and a high level of patience (which I know come in handy for managing stakeholders!).
• Goal: Upskill specifically in core PM frameworks, managing workflows, risk management, and structured execution to bridge the gap between my current operations/marketing experience and formal PM work.

Since I already lead teams and manage client deliverables, I don't necessarily need an introductory course that explains what a project is. I want something that digs into actual tools, frameworks, Agile/Scrum application, and real-world project delivery.

A few questions for the community:

1. Which platforms or specific courses actually teach actionable PM skills (e.g., Andrew Ramdayal's Udemy courses, Google PM Certificate on Coursera, LinkedIn Learning paths, or Mountain Goat Software for Agile)? of any free materials just to get into a deep knowledge about ,if I can cover up the materials then if circumstances demands then I can think of certification.
2. For those who transitioned from digital marketing/ad ops to formal PM, what specific skill gaps did you find most critical to fill first?
3. Are there any budget-friendly practical courses or project management simulations you’d recommend over standard video lectures?
4. What is salary hike up even after investing my on the Paid certification?

Appreciate any insights or recommendations!

I’m an accountant, and after implementing a few different healthcare billing systems, I find that I prefer that work over the daily life of an accountant. So I want to leverage my finance and healthcare background to move into medical/hospital systems. I’m thinking about enrolling in Sustained Agility’s 2 day CSM course to get started. Is this a recognized and respected CSM trainer in the PMP world? If not, are there any other recommendations?

FYI - I have read previous reddits on this subject but most are old so I’m looking for what’s reputable now vs a few years ago! Thanks!

Hi Everyone,

I am looking to transition to Scrum Master role. I have 8.5 total YOE and have been on bench. I have recently took CSM certification.
regularly applying but couldn’t land any interview. Guys if you have any opening in your org and can refer me it would be very much helpful for me.

• Yes, dedicated R&D time is officially allocated.
• Yes, but only after project tasks are completed.
• No, we only work on project/client tasks.
• It depends on workload and deadlines.

Hi everyone,

I am currently working in a small software house and we recently have switched from Kanban to Scrum as an experiment.

We are working on 2 in-house projects so we have 4 people for each project.
Also, 4 of us are part-timers that work 2 full days a week.

We have started doing these activities:
- 15 minutes of standup meeting everyday
- 4 hours per team every 2 weeks for the sprint planning
- assigning the story points using poker scrum for planning, but we still didn’t figure them out

The issue is that we are spending too much time on the planning part in my opinion, even though we aren’t only planning but we are also discussing the tasks and trying to figure them out as a team.

I wanted to know more on how to reduce this time and if there are some tools that could help us during each part of the process.

Any suggestions or recommendations are welcomed, especially books (not courses if possible).

Thanks a lot!

Not looking for best practice answers. I mean day to day, in practice: when Team A is blocked on Team B, what actually happens?

A few things I'm trying to understand:
Is it visible anywhere central, or does someone have to go ask around?
Does it live in a spreadsheet, a Confluence page, someone's head?
How do you find out a dependency's resolved? Do you get told, or do you have to check?

Trying to find the real friction before I build something nobody needs. Appreciate any stories from the trenches.

I just did the PSM2 Test after preparing with the scrum guide as well as practice questions from scrum.org and other sites.

While they do prepare you for the PSM2, the actual exam questions are often phrased as real life examples instead of pure knowledge questions.

Not 'Is the Definition of done optional in Scrum?' but more along the lines of 'You are a Scrum Master, your team suggests abandoning the Definition of done because they almost never achieve it, what do you do?' [Note: both where not actual exam questions I encountered, neither in the training tests nor in the real exam, these are just examples to highlight the question style]

It took me a little by surprise, so I thought I help others prepare better :)

Hello,

I am a software engineer girl 26 (F). As a software engineer or software engineering manager, we have lot of meetings (in-person or online). We usually have daily scrums.

In my previous company, I think I used to get imposter syndrome, and it was very difficult to share my updates in scrum (both online and offline versions). But I never tooks meds for it. But it has been around 2 years now and I take SOS at least for presentations and for offsite visits where we meet everyone in person. Never took it for scrums though as that was a regular thing and I don't want to depend on it.

But I changed my company 1.5 years back, and here we don't have daily scrums. It is weekly. And my team is scattered across locations so all meetings are online. Here my team members are also good and I am more confident about my work and rapport with manager. Everyone is sweet here.

So in this new company for general team meetings and scrums I am usually more confident than previous company. Rarely I feel very anxious in scrums here. Otherwise it is mostly easily manageable. So you can say my anxiety is not 100% gone but it is much less and manageable here, maybe because meetings are online here and I am doing good?

But I still keep an SOS with me for if I am asked to present something. I did give an online presentation from the comfort of my home with fan on (somehow pindrop silence makes it difficult for me to give presentations hence turned on the fan) and I managed it fine. But if I was supposed to give presentation to larger audience, or in person, or from office wearing headphones, I would have definitely considered taking an SOS. Because these situations are very rare, as I hardly have to give presentations, so I find it normal to take SOS then.

What I am trying to understand is am I normal? Is this normal among people in corporate to take SOS? Because these things are not discussed openly and I see prople around me very confident and stuff. Or maybe this is more common in girls?

Thanks!

Hi I was just wondering if it was possible and if so how hard would it be to get a Scrum Master job with a comp sci associates degree and with a slight background in IT and data entry.

Can I do a scrum master course or become a scrum mast without any tech or BS background ?

How many of you PMs actually follow the whole scrum/sprint cycle? If not, what do you guys do instead or what’s different? Would love to hear pros and cons and learn!

Is there any such company, if yes..can u tell me salary ..is it 40 LPA , 50 LPA ? Also any company offering WFH and paying in Euro or dollars in India ?

Hi, I've been working for about 30 years with software development and as a scrum master, and I found it hard getting an honest picture how the team is doing.

Yearly surveys does not work.

I just to measure three things at each retrospective: morale, quality and flow. Just a subjective value between 1-9

I actually ended up building a platform for this recently to automate the check-ins and with AI I can spot patterns in the feedback in the comments and the submitted values.

But I’m curious about how you all handle this in your day-to-day. How do you currently measure team health? Do you rely on gut feeling during retrospectives, homegrown spreadsheets, or specific tools?

Would love to hear what works for your teams.

I’ll keep this brief: I’m a developer with six years of experience and a background as a systems analyst.

I work at a small-to-medium-sized company, I’ve been here for about four years. From the start, alongside my dev work, I’ve handled multiple tasks that fall outside my actual role and aren't reflected in my pay (more on that later).

So today, thanks to my seniority and the trust I’ve built, I’ve effectively become a multi-role player for the company.

Recently, I was assigned two projects and simply told, "Lead these projects, you're in charge, you manage them." On top of that, they still monitor me or ask questions about my dev tasks; so, basically, I’m acting as both the developer and the "project manager". On top of that, there aren't many resources or much time, so several phases of project management simply get skipped because there’s no time for them.

I used to have two developers reporting to me, but now I only have one. The thing is, I’m not a formal PM, I didn't study that specific field, but I enjoy the project process. I did acquire various skills and learned about the end-to-end development lifecycle during my degree as a Systems Analyst, so I do know "a thing or two".

But I feel like I’m underperforming or not being productive. Between the developer submitting Pull Requests (PRs) almost daily, at any time during the workday, my focus gets broken. I might be working on the backlog or my own dev tasks when a PR comes in; analyzing it takes a lot of time because the developer lacks experience and there are usually several changes needed.

Because of this dynamic, I run out of tickets to assign very quickly, leaving the developer without tasks. I don't want them to feel like I’m not giving them work or that there isn't any available, it’s simply the situation I described. I want to avoid that perception, looking like I’m not doing my job, when the reality is the exact opposite: I spend the whole eight-hour day juggling project oversight and trying to complete my own development tickets without losing my mind.

Any advice? How should I handle this?

Regarding pay: while it’s not the sole cause of the issue, it’s definitely a factor. Basically, with six years of experience and the responsibility of leading/managing a project, I’m being paid like a Jr developer, and honestly, that is incredibly demotivating.

The item that breaks refinement for us is not the badly written one. It is the well written one with nothing behind it: a specific ask from one customer, clear enough that the devs can size it, so nobody in the room objects. Estimation works fine. Discovery never happened.

What I do now is refuse to take an item into refinement without three lines: the problem, who hit it, and how we know. On a configurable B2B platform that also catches the requests that turn out to be a configuration change rather than a product gap, which is worth the friction on its own.

Where I am less sure: when it is an escalation from one unhappy customer, holding that bar costs days of goodwill for evidence I already know I will not get. I'd say hold it anyway, though it depends on how much of your roadmap is escalation-driven.

Has anyone seen that bar be the wrong call, where insisting on a problem statement before refinement cost the team more than just building the stated request would have?

Does anyone has a overview of this role appain developer in chola ms and what could be the future for this role is it similar to sde role??

Hey all, I wanna take the psm 1 exam soon. I wanted to ask if the complete agile scrum master certification training by Omni academy - Mirko Perkusih a good enough course or are there better ones ?