I’m curious to know what other career pathways there are based on the skills/experience required to be an Agile Coach and whether there is any one here that has a proven record of pivoting into a new career where skills are transferable.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I’m curious to know what other career pathways there are based on the skills/experience required to be an Agile Coach and whether there is any one here that has a proven record of pivoting into a new career where skills are transferable.
I think everything along the line of coaching. Could be individual, team or organization coaching. I would take a look at fiverr https://www.fiverr.com/ and search for keywords. I think this will give you an idea.
I guess the core thing is “what do you want out of a career?”
I’ve been working in technology businesses for 30 years or so. When I started out I wanted to “climb the ladder” as part of my career, through technical roles into leadership ones where I made decisions.
And to some extent I did that; after about 8 years I was into line management roles with operational and strategic leadership within my domain area. That included being “product manager” and running a small software development product team where we embraced agility for the first time.
I’ve been the line manager for larger groups – like 50+ people in a department with a wider range of functions – but at a point I was in meetings I disliked talking about stuff I didn’t care about. I had done a bunch of leadership development programmes of different types at that point, all of which were built around the same “Theory-Y” approaches that align with agility and so on. I also had HSE as part of my role (teams in remote field areas) and so the links between DevOps and HSE were very solid.
So when my org restructured I took redundancy, and doubled down on agility. I did a lot of self-directed study – like reading key texts back to back and so on – while doing an ICF-accredited coaching course and getting a PSM-1 certification.
At that point I started to get fixed-term and contract Scrum Master positions, but kept up the study and learning, doing some Kanban courses and so on.
At a point I’d suggest:
– job titles don’t matter; it’s about what you are good at, what you love, and what you get paid to do. Scrum Master accountabilities should extend to the wider org going down an evidence-based continuous improvement approach
– what you want now out of life might not be what you want in 5 years, or 10 years. Plan, for sure, but be prepared to respond to change
– focus on the skill/competency areas where you are weakest. For me that was coaching. Then train and study in those areas. Invest in yourself – don’t wait for companies to do this.
– leadership, leadership, leadership. Learn about leadership, how to teach it to people, and how to be an effective coach so they grow new perspectives
– don’t limit your learning to “agile” stuff. read about business, business strategy, change management, finance, product development, marketing all that stuff. Mostly “agile” books are regurgitated fluff – even better if you go to the underpinning stuff.
– data analysis and statistics matter; if you are weak in these areas then build it up. Empiricism means being able to analyse hard data in a way that is useful for decision making.
I think that’s about it for now?