How to become an Agile Coach?
1. Build Agile Coach Skills
There are a few skills that are often requested of agile coaches:
- Knowledge of Agile frameworks: Knowledge of various agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe will be critical in being an effective Agile Coach. Proper knowledge of what distinguishes one framework from the other.
- Communication: Knowing how to communicate effectively, knowing how to persuade, negotiate, inspire, and resolve conflicts is one of the skills expected in an Agile coach.
- Knowledge of project management tools: Knowledge of how to use project management tools and software enough to explain to others how to use them.
2. Gain Agile Project Management Experience
Job descriptions often ask for experience in agile environments. One can gain experience in a few different ways:
- Work as scrum master: Many job descriptions count scrum master as coaching experience. Being a scrum master act as a natural stepping stone to agile coaching.
- Work on an Agile team: As an agile coach, one should be familiar with how agile works on different teams, and knowledge of other methodologies will be useful as well.
3. Get an Agile Coach Certification
Agile coach certifications can make you more competitive in the job market and will also signal to employers that one has a baseline knowledge expected by professionals. Below are some of the common certifications:
- SAFe Practitioner (SP).
- SAFe Practitioner Consultant (SPC).
- SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT).
- PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP).
- ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching Certification (ICP-ACC).
- ICAgile Certified Expert in Agile Coaching Certification (ICE-AC).
What is an Agile Coach?
An agile coach is a project management professional that helps to scale Agile practices across a team or organization. They enable teams or organizations to be more flexible, transparent, and efficient. So basically, an Agile Coach is a person who knows the various best practices of various processes of Agile. Also, this person guides the other members who are new in the team about Agile processes, as well as experienced ones. It also looks out for any loopholes for the new team. One needs to have both patience and the presence of mind to become a good coach, as it is not an easy task.
- The person is an Agile Process Expert, who knows the best of the process involved.
- It is not biased.
- It is an Agile Expert.
- The coach is generally not from an organization.
- It has implemented Agile Processes across different cultures and environments.
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