This Scrum Life: Scrum Masters Helping Scrum Masters
With little to no experience, what’s a freshly-minted Scrum Master who’s looking for a job supposed to do?
Back in 2018, a group of us editors here at Serious Scrum (Sjoerd Nijland, Willem-Jan Ageling, Paddy Corry, and myself) published a post about what advice we’d give to our younger selves when we started out as professional Scrum Masters. The importance of finding a mentor was called out, and based on a few conversations going on in our Slack channel, we thought it’d be a good idea to bring the conversation to a broader audience.
One question that I frequently hear is about how to get started in the Scrum Master game. While companies are interested in finding folks to fill the role, oftentimes there’s a minimum requirement in terms of experience. So, let’s get to the question we’ll tackle in this post:
“How can I find a job as a Scrum Master with almost no experience?”
Here’s some suggestions on how to address this question:
Sjoerd
- Start small and humble. Like an internship.
- Be a rebel. Introduce Scrum yourself. Just casually get things rolling, and the rest, slowly but surely, will follow suit.
- Perhaps starting as a Scrum Team member or be the change agent yourself from traditional management/team leadership role to servant-leader role.
- I don’t think companies (in general) will trust their organisation to someone completely new to it (and neither should they IMO). Or if they would consider it one would search for alternative matching track records and personal traits (authentic leadership competencies).
- Reaching out to a community asking something like: “Hey I am new to the game and am looking for a Scrum Master who wouldn’t mind me cruising along for a day so I can get a taste of hands-on, real life Scrum…”
- Maybe ask for references about competencies that match that of a Scrum Master.
John
- Here in St. Louis, we have a program called Launch Code. It’s primarily for folks to learn development, and from there, helps participants find work in the field. They recently began offering a Scrum Master course. Look for similar programs where you live.
- I’ve also known folks that’ve implemented Guerrilla Scrum to gain experience. If you’re brave, give that a try.
Willem-Jan
- Engage in Agile communities. This can be on-line, but you can also engage in meetups or visit conferences.
- Write about Scrum. Writing forces you to study a certain topic and put it in words in a concise way. Share your articles within a community and build a network this way. It allows you to demonstrate your Scrum knowledge which can also count as experience.
- Do Scrum in your private life! Make your family a Scrum team, sprint along and learn and improve!
Paddy
- Plus one on writing! It helps me understand empiricism.
- As a former developer, I dramatically under-estimated the learning required in the Scrum Master role. Developers naturally feel under pressure to continuously learn new tools, technologies and languages — upgrades are constantly required to stay current. However, newly minted Scrum Masters would do well to note that this is also the case for a Scrum Master. It is not a chance to relax from that feeling of having knowledge gaps to fill… There are endless learning opportunities available in the role. My advice: be prepared for a long apprenticeship!
- Starting with the absolute fundamentals in the Scrum Guide is really important. If you are talking to someone about a potential Scrum Master role, you should at the very least be able to demonstrate good knowledge of the contents. “Know your 3–5–3”, the 3 roles, 5 events, 3 artifacts. Understand empiricism. Be aware of the Scrum Values. Also, if I could offer a conceit, this post about the Scrum Guide evolving, and the need to keep up, is also useful advice I wish I had starting out.
- Last point, grow your bookshelf! Willem-Jan Ageling’s post about the important works that influenced Scrum is a really great resource to bookmark.
How would you answer this question? Feel free to drop some feedback in the comments. If you found this post valuable, let us know. What other questions should we cover?
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