The Path To Your Scrum Master Job

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Reading time: 9 minutes

Updated 2 December 2022. Many thanks to commenters on LinkedIn for additional ideas on things that could make aspiring Scrum Masters better candidates.

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Every so often, I offer free coaching calls to whoever wants one. Invariably, my schedule fills up very quickly, and at least half of the people who want to chat are asking some form of the same question:

How do I get a Scrum Master job, when I have no previous experience as a Scrum Master?

It’s important to note that I (as well as many other Agilists) believe that Scrum Master is not really an entry-level position. Going into a Scrum Master job with no experience is incredibly difficult, so most employers are searching for someone with years of experience, even if they call it entry-level.

This does not mean that it’s impossible to get a Scrum Master job with no experience, though. There are some companies willing to hire newbies and train them to do the job. The following is advice to help you stand out from the very large crowd of people all trying to find their way into the too-small number of positions that are actually available.

Dream Scenario: You work someplace that already has Scrum Masters, and you want to keep working there.

The simplest way to land a job as a Scrum Master is via internal transfer. This is easily the path of least resistance.

Talk to your manager about your desire to move into this role. Find someone who manages Scrum Masters, and tell them the same thing.

Then find a Scrum Master in your company who will mentor you or let you shadow them. Ambition is your friend in this situation.

You don't need to read anything else in this article. This is the way forward for you. Be thankful that it's this straightforward.

Everybody else: Your workplace does not employ Scrum Masters, or they do, but you don't want to work there anymore.

This is the most common situation. Now you have to go swimming in a sea of companies you don't know, who don't know you. Here's what you have to do.

1. Go get certified

You can take the CSM or the PSM-1. The CSM requires that you take a training course before you take an exam, and the PSM-1 does not. Employers generally will not even want to interview you if you do not have a certification. I wrote more about this here:

PSM? CSM? OMG! WTF?

2. Apply Scrum to your personal life

I recommend one simple thing that involves a team, and one more complex thing that’s just you alone.

A good example of a simple team-based thing is just organizing chores and to-do lists for your family or roommates onto a Kanban board, then facilitating Sprint Planning, a Daily Scrum, a Sprint Review and Sprint Retro each week. This will give you some experience with what the Scrum Events are like in real life.

Scrum is meant for teams, but you can still gain some insights from trying to do complex work on your own. An example here is trying to write a book. In this case, you can learn a lot of softer skills, like estimating complexity, writing User Stories, breaking tasks into manageable bits, and iterating to add value over time.

3. Implement Scrum in some way at your current job

This may or may not be possible, depending on what your job is and how much power you have to change things there. But if you can do it, you’ll now have some strong experience to draw upon in interviews.

4. Attend meetups and ask questions

Most cities with a tech sector will have local Agile meetup groups. You can usually find them on meetup.com or EventBrite. If you're not in one of these areas, there are lots of digital meetups and discussion groups online. A great first group to join is "Scrum Masters of the Universe.”

5. Look for volunteer opportunities

This one is hard - I don’t think a lot of these opportunities exist, and making a commitment to act as Scrum Master for a real team on top of your current work and personal life can stretch you thin. However, if it fits in your life without risking burnout, getting any Scrum Master experience you can legitimately add to your resume can be very valuable.

6. Join a cohort

Especially if you can't find a volunteer opportunity, and you're not able to implement Scrum at your current workplace, you might have to resort to something more expensive to get your first experience working on a Scrum Team. There are cohorts you can join that put you on a Scrum Team working on a product. You can see what it's like to work in all the Scrum Accountabilities in this way.

I host one of these from time to time, so start by visiting https://scrumteam.carrd.co to see if I'm enrolling right now. You can also connect with organizers of other cohorts via LinkedIn, like Patty Aluskewicz.

7. Fix up your resume

You will need to rewrite the sections of your resume where you talk about what you did in your previous roles so that it sounds like you were doing Scrummy things already. Even if you haven’t worked as a Scrum Master, you want to find and accentuate the transferable skills you used in your previous work that are applicable to the Scrum Master role.

• Replace the action verbs you're currently using with things like facilitate, coach, mentor, teach, or lead. These are all keywords that align with a Scrum Master role.

• Look for opportunities to talk about transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Again, these are keywords for Scrum, so they’ll put readers in the mindset that you worked on things in the way that a Scrum Master would.

• DO NOT lie about your previous job titles. This is a big one - don’t say you were a Scrum Master at your last job if you were not. If you were a Project Coordinator, but you did a lot of teaching, coaching, and facilitation, then say you were a Project Coordinator and talk about your experiences teaching, coaching, and facilitating.

8. Update your LinkedIn profile

There are parts of your profile that are factual and have no room for flexibility, like the titles of your previous positions. Then there are other parts where you can do interesting things.

Once you start writing on LinkedIn (which I recommend a little further down the page), more people will start to find your profile. So make sure your headline and description talk about you as a Scrum Master. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been hired by someone else for that role yet. If you see yourself as a Scrum Master at heart, then you can say you are one at the top of the screen, just below your name. This is how you get recruiters and hiring managers to know what job you are seeking.

Don't forget to align your LinkedIn profile with your résumé, including all the Scrum-related keywords you worked in above.

9. Find a mentor in the community

The Agile community is very welcoming, and you'd be wise to avail yourself of it. You can find working Scrum Masters who will be willing to talk with you about the way their teams work, why they love their jobs, and how they got into the business themselves.

Talk to people who speak at your local Agile meetups, or send messages to Agilists you see posting on LinkedIn. You might be surprised how quick everyone jumps to help one another.

10. Continue to study Scrum

Once you get your first job as a Scrum Master, you’ll find out quickly that a giant chunk of your time is spent learning about Scrum, learning about your team, learning about your organization, learning about Scrum, and … learning about Scrum. It’s meant for complex work, so naturally it’s going to have complex applications.

There are a plethora of resources where you can continue to read about Scrum or watch videos explaining common issues Scrum teams might run into. You really won’t run out of content to consume, so don’t wait until you have the job to start on your continuous learning adventure.

11. Write about Scrum

I think this is the tipping point. Writing about Scrum is as close to doing Scrum as we can get when we’re not doing Scrum. Every time you write, you’re doing a thought experiment, considering a problem that arises and how Scrum Masters or other team members should address it. It’s useful for building knowledge for sure - but it may even be a form of experience.

The best place for this is LinkedIn. The Agile community on LinkedIn is strong, and loud. There are a lot of conversations about interesting issues. Join these conversations in the comment sections. At least once per week, write your own post with an idea you have related to Scrum. Don’t worry if it’s not particularly insightful or even downright wrong. You can’t lose by posting to LinkedIn - you only either win, or you learn.

LinkedIn’s memory is famously short, too. If you say something and find out it’s wrong, you’ll learn your lesson and a week later nobody will ever see that post again. It’s a great place to try out new ideas.

Writing on LinkedIn calls recruiters to your profile instead of having to go hunt down the jobs yourself. That's why this may be the most important step to take to get access to open positions.

12. Look for side doors

Remember when I said at the top of this article that internal transfer is the easiest way to become a Scrum Master? It’s still true.

So, if your previous work was as tech support at a company that didn’t have Scrum Masters, but there is an opening for tech support at another company that does have Scrum Masters… this might be your way in. If you can tough it out in a position that isn’t your dream job for another year, then you may be able to set yourself up for the easy route in.

You should still do all the things mentioned above, but you’ll have a second path that could get you right where you want to be.

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Whenever you're ready, here's how I can help:

• I've created a framework for Personal Agility called Scrumify. Click this link to read it.

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• If you're trying to Scrumify something big in your life and want to work with me, I can be your Personal Scrum Master. Contact me here.

• I occasionally host cohort programs for aspiring Scrum Masters looking for their first experience on a Scrum Team. Click here to sign up for the next one.