Scrum Master

Agile and Scrum are not new words for the industry today, and are growing in popularity consistently. Such growth in adoption is natural, given the statistics that the adoption of Scrum in most cases has shown positive results as far as an increase in productivity and product quality is concerned.

We will not go into much detail of how Scrum operates, but with a rising number of professionals pondering over becoming a Scrum Professional, it will be helpful to outline a number of Scrum Master career benefits. Before that, let us understand in brief what a Scrum Master is responsible for:

Who is a Scrum Master?

A Scrum team consists of a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and a Development Team. The Product Owner creates the vision for a product and communicates it within and outside of the team. The development team is a self-organizing team of multi-faceted developers that work on product development.

A Scrum Master, on the other hand, has the following responsibilities:

  1. Clearing any impediments that slow down the product development process or cause obstacles in the implementation of Scrum
  2. Establishing a conducive environment for the team to operate
  3. Addressing team dynamics
  4. Ensuring good relationships between team and product owner as well as with those on the outside (e.g. business owner, customer).

Career Benefits of a Scrum Master

#1. Greater Market Demand

The year-after-year growth of a Scrum Master’s job stands at 400%. It is a plain fact that more and more companies are adopting some sort of Agile approach, and Scrum leads the way with over half the companies opting for the Scrum framework (check image below).

One of the best parts of becoming a Scrum Master is that one does not have to go through a detailed learning phase such as getting a master’s degree or enrolling for a six-month course. Many project managers and software developers (among a variety of others) of yesterday are today’s Scrum Masters, a transition of a couple of days or a week at most.

#2. Higher Salaries

This is probably the most popular and attractive reason for opting to be a Scrum Master. The following image shows a trend of salaries that Scrum Masters command. It can be seen that the largest portion crosses the $100,000 mark and so does the average.

In comparison to regular tech jobs such as an IT engineer, given the fact that Scrum Master is a relatively new kind of role, such salaries are commendable. Additionally, stats also prove Scrum Master salary keeps growing every year significantly.

#3. Better Team Building Abilities

A Scrum Master is expected to be well-versed with the values and principles of Scrum. Without going into the specifics, it can be said that Scrum values and principles focus largely on motivating teams, maintaining a conducive environment, maintaining transparency, and shifting a lot of decision making power to the hands of the team.

One of the reasons for Scrum’s success is the elimination of centralized decision making and rigid long term plans. This implies that teams have to continuously work in complete synchronization and flexibility, adapting to changes throughout the way. A Scrum Master thus is needed to develop great team leading and team building skills, which have a positive impact on his professional life.

#4. Part of an elite Scrum Community

Becoming a Scrum Master makes you a part of the global Scrum community of Scrum practitioners. This helps benefit from a variety of general and specific experiences of various domains and even various industries.

#5. Driver of Change

Like hundreds of organizations who transformed their numbers on product development and its efficiency, your role as a Scrum Master not only benefits your wallet, but also causes a significant impact on your organization’s numbers on deadlines, resources spent, etc.

Although some may not view this as an individual career benefit, in the long-term it certainly is a benefit to your own career if you accelerate your organization’s business in some way or another.

Conclusion

It is a real and simple fact that as long as companies want to flourish by delivering better and earning more, they will want individuals who can deliver in that direction. As far as frameworks are concerned, even after decades and maybe centuries, the traditional approaches to projects seem to have a considerably large number of obstacles. In the form of Agile, specifically Scrum, most of these obstacles, such as crossed deadlines and customer dissatisfaction over quality or transparency, are solved.

Professionals certified in Scrum, such as Scrum Masters, are and will remain for a comfortably long period some of the most wanted in the tech industry, with observable benefits of higher pay, better skills and more fulfilling jobs.