Reflecting on Renewing My Scrum Inc. Registered Scrum Master (RSM) License: My Exam Experience One Year Later

Introduction

I am Kinoshita, a prototyping engineer at KINTO Technologies. To kick off an upcoming series on Agile here on the blog, I’ll start by sharing a quick update on renewing my Scrum Inc. Registered Scrum Master qualification. If you are interested in how to become a Registered Scrum Master and what the seminar contains, please read this previous article I wrote on this topic. When I wrote the previous article, the certification was called Licensed Scrum Master (LSM), but on July 29, 2022, it was renamed to Registered Scrum Master (RSM). It seems the license name was automatically updated, as my certification had also changed to RSM (Registered Scrum Master). I’ve added this name change to the previous article as well.

The Renewal

A year after obtaining the license, you receive an email notifying you that its expiration date is approaching and that it will become invalid unless renewed. However, I did not notice the email myself, so I was unaware that the renewal deadline was coming up until a colleague who attended the previous seminar with me mentioned it. You have 60 days to decide whether to renew, and if you choose to proceed, you need to go to the members’ site, pay the renewal fee and unlock the renewal exam.

I had initially thought the renewal would cost $50 per year, but it turns out there are also options for five-year and lifetime plans. This time, it seems there was a discount, reducing the five-year plan from $250 to $199 and the lifetime plan from $500 to $399.

At KINTO Technologies, subsidies cover seminars but not certifications, so I would be covering this renewal cost myself. Even with the discount, with the yen as weak as 138 to the dollar (at the time of payment), brought the costs to approximately 27,500 yen for the $199 plan and around 55,000 yen for the $399 one. The prices didn’t seem so daunting in dollars, but once I converted them to yen, I felt a sharp pain in both my wallet and my heart.

Why I Renewed

Given that I had very few opportunities to apply what I had learned about Scrum and would have to pay out of my own pocket, I honestly wasn't eager to renew. In addition to the difficulty of getting stakeholders to understand Agile and dispel their resistance to it, and to the fact that the teams and groups are so large, not everyone wants to do Agile and Scrum either. It felt like a pretty tall order from the start. As a result, I strongly felt that it would be important to involve people around me in order to find like-minded individuals to help create a more supportive atmosphere for it, even if it was just a small step at a time. In the end, fostering a "Let's do it!" mindset would be far more important than whether or not I had a license.
What changed my attitude—and also inspired me to write this article—was the expansion of my network within the company, which provided me with numerous opportunities to discuss Scrum Master topics with people I had never met before. One of these was a chance to talk about it with other teams in a roundtable discussion held thanks to avid Agile enthusiast Kin-chan really hitting the ground running after joining the company. Listening to them made me regret having kept it all pent up inside, and shifted me a little bit back toward wanting to figure out how to solve my own similar concerns. It dawned on me that having the license would continue to expand my circle, which might, in turn, increase the opportunities to put it to use. These thoughts made me more inclined to renew. A major factor was that, almost eerily at the last minute, a colleague at the company reached out after reading my previous article. They knew how much the renewal would cost but strongly encouraged me to go ahead and renew anyway.
Prompted by this encouragement, and also figuring that if I was going to do it then I might as well go all in, I opted for the lifetime plan. Still torn between wanting to and not wanting to renew, my head was full of the pain in my wallet even during the exam, but despite that, I managed to pass it without a hitch. To ease the sting on my heart and wallet, I took one of the souvenir candies someone had left out in the office. As I ate it, I treated it like a 55,000-yen indulgence, savoring every bite.
The colleague who had attended the seminar with me last time had also renewed, but apparently opted for the annual renewal. They mentioned that when they took the exam, there was quite a bit they had forgotten, so they were glad they had chosen the yearly renewal, as it gave them a chance to review everything again.

About the Renewal Exam

You get not just one, but two chances to take the renewal exam, just like with the exam after the seminar last time. After answering all the questions, you get shown your score and which ones you got right and wrong, so you can see where you made mistakes. The content and difficulty of the questions felt the same level as the ones after the seminar last year. If you pass, you get an email to tell you, and the expiry date displayed beneath the official mark in the bottom right of the certificate changes to “Valid Until Lifetime.”

So, I am now a Registered Scrum Master for life and will never need to take the renewal exam again. I no longer have to worry about whether to renew it every time it expires.

Conclusion, and a Plug

A year had passed since I last took the seminar, and it was time to decide whether to renew my license. Personally, I didn’t feel that the license had proven its value over the past year. However, I started to see its worth for a reason I hadn’t originally considered: it opened up opportunities to connect with people. With that in mind, I decided to renew.
At KINTO Technologies, many other teams, projects, and products are embracing the challenge of Agile and Scrum, in addition to those involved in the roundtable discussion. Our avid Agile enthusiast Kin-chan will cover these topics in the upcoming series on Agile I mentioned earlier.
Kin-chan has a broad view of Agile, unbound by any specific development framework, and has already taken passionate steps to champion it within the company multiple times. Personally, I’m looking forward to the series offering a wide range of perspectives. So, it is definitely something to look forward to.