How to Get a Job as a Scrum Master
People often ask me how they can land their first job as a Scrum Master, especially when employers expect prior experience as a Scrum Master. Earning your CSM certification may be required but not sufficient for many employers. Here are some tips.
Work as an individual contributor in an agile team
Find a good agile organization, and get an individual contributor position using your prior skills and experience. Once you’re in the door, you have the opportunity to demonstrate your potential as a facilitator, coach and leader. This may be the best route to earning a Scrum Master title if you don’t already have that experience.
Show how you’ve applied agile principles and practices on-the-job
Even if your team wasn’t officially using Scrum, what practices were aligned with Agile principles? Did you have frequent retrospectives? Did you have daily synchronization/huddle meetings with your team? Did you visualize your work using something similar to a kanban board?
If you served as a traditional project manager or team leader, what agile-like practices did you initiate? What facilitation and coaching skills did you leverage? How did you demonstrate servant leadership within your team?
Volunteer as a Scrum Master for a non-profit organization
This is a great way to earn real experience as Scrum Master and help a good cause at the same time.
Volunteer for your local Agile/Scrum user group
Most large cities have one or more active Agile & Scrum meetup groups. Join, get to know the people, and volunteer to help. They’ll likely be eager for willing volunteers, and you’ll be expanding your network.
Join the Truly Scrum online community
The Truly Scrum community was created by Valerio Zanini as a forum for people to support each other in finding Scrum Master jobs.
Develop your human (soft) skills and functional skills
The Scrum Alliance and Business Agility Institute surveyed employers to find out what skills are in demand. They found that employers are looking for not only functional/technical skills, but also human skills: communication, teamwork, attitude, problem solving and critical thinking, among others. This suggest a “Pi shaped skill set” — deep expertise in a few skills, and shallower experience across a broad range of skills. Based in part on this employer survey, Jesse Fewell offers three key tips to standing out in this job market:
Broadcast your bottom-line impact: quantify the results you’ve had with your teams
Develop a Pi-shaped skills profile
Pivot to a different role where you can use your skills: e.g. people manager, program manager, technical team leader, etc.