Scrum Master Certification Readiness
Signature Course No. 140 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Scrum Master Certification Readiness course, in the Leadership & Management category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
You follow one candidate throughout — Dorian Pruitt, Scrum Master to Team Wren at Cobble & Thread Retail Group — and catch his errors before they become yours: answering from workplace habit instead of the Guide, protecting the wrong accountability, reaching for a tool instead of an event.
This is the course for working Scrum Masters preparing for a first attempt, practitioners returning after a failed attempt, team members and coaches moving toward the Scrum Master accountability, and candidates choosing between the two reference routes. It works in two movements: first, Module 1 — The Framework as the Assessments Test It — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Framework Audit; then, Module 2 — Readiness: Depth, Diagnosis, and Execution — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Readiness Plan You Can Defend.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Framework Audit and in The Readiness Plan You Can Defend.
You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Independent, and stated plainly. This is an independent preparation course. It is not published by Scrum.org or by Scrum Alliance, not reviewed by either body, and not affiliated with either body. PSM, Professional Scrum Master, and related marks belong to Scrum.org; CSM, Certified ScrumMaster, and related marks belong to Scrum Alliance, Inc.
Every assessment fact is reported as published at the time of writing — question counts, durations, pass marks, fees, attempt and attendance rules — because the certifying bodies can and do revise those facts. If a body's current page and this course ever disagree, the body's page wins, and the course teaches you to check it before you book.
No real assessment question appears anywhere in it: every practice item was written fresh, in assessment style, teaching the reasoning that produces answers on questions you have never seen. Every worked number recomputes from stated inputs. Readiness here is built and defended on evidence; no outcome on the day is promised or guaranteed.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a complete framework audit of a working team, judged against the Guide with a repair for every defect found, and a full certification readiness plan you defend in writing — not just ideas about preparation.
This is the one hundred and fortieth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the Guide's Scrum, not with your workplace's dialect of it. The assessments test a short, precise, published framework — empiricism as its theory, three accountabilities, five events, three artifacts with their commitments — and every result is read back through that framework. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the baseline you only think you know.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Framework Audit for Module 1 and The Readiness Plan You Can Defend for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
A Scrum master certification assessment does not ask whether you can recite the Scrum Guide. It presents a short, pressured situation — a Daily Scrum turned into a status report, a Product Backlog item that is not Done being counted as finished, a stakeholder demanding a mid-Sprint change, a Sprint cancelled in all but name — and asks what the Scrum Master should do, with options that are often all plausible in some workplace and only one that follows the Guide.
This course teaches the Guide and the assessment craft together. You will learn Scrum theory — empiricism and lean thinking — and the framework exactly as the Guide states it: the accountabilities, the events with their purposes and timeboxes, and the artifacts with their commitments. You will learn how the Scrum Master serves the team, the Product Owner, and the organisation, and where that service stops.
You will work the small arithmetic family the assessments use — velocity, percentages, score thresholds, pacing — with numbers that recompute exactly.
And you will build the execution system that turns knowledge into a pass: a route decision between the two reference certifications, a study system fitted to a working life, a practice-set review method that repairs reasoning rather than collecting scores, and a sitting-day method for pace and triage.
What you will learn
- Compare the two reference routes and choose the one that fits your situation, on facts you have verified
- State each assessment's published format — questions, duration, pass mark, attempt and attendance rules — as published at the time of writing
- Explain empiricism and lean thinking, and use transparency, inspection, and adaptation to judge a situation
- Assign every decision to its owning accountability — Scrum Master, Product Owner, or Developers — and defend the boundary
- State the purpose, participants, and timebox of every Scrum event, and diagnose events that have lost their purpose
- State each artifact and its commitment, and rule on work that claims to be Done when it is not
- Read situational questions by governing concept, eliminate distractor families, and compute the assessment's arithmetic exactly
- Build a study system, review practice sets by reasoning error, and execute a timed sitting plan
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Scrum Master Certification Readiness, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Framework Audit and The Readiness Plan You Can Defend
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the practitioner whose experience must become Guide logic
Scrum Master Certification Readiness is for working Scrum Masters preparing for a first attempt — who serve a real team now and need the Guide's framing, not another retelling of their own workplace's habits — practitioners returning after a failed attempt, who discovered that experience alone did not answer situational questions, team members and coaches moving toward the Scrum Master accountability, and candidates choosing between routes, who need an honest comparison of an assessment-only route and a course-first route before they spend money in either direction.
This course assumes you already work in or beside a Scrum Team and can describe a Sprint from your own experience. It assumes no prior certification course. Eligibility and route facts are taught at guidance level in Concepts 1 and 2 — what each body publishes, what evidence or attendance each route requires, and where to check the current rule before you book — because the authoritative source is always the certifying body's current published page, never this course.
If you already reason an area well, the test-out route in each concept lets you prove it and move faster — the bar does not drop; the route just gets shorter.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Framework Audit
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Scrum Master Certification Readiness is Signature Course No. 140. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.