Unemployed Agilists: How to Increase Your Value to Get a Great Job, Part 3

If you're an unemployed agilist, you are not alone. There way too many of you. But the causes and solutions might not be clear to you. That's why Part 1 of this series discusses your value and what managers want and need. That part discusses why managers see agile coaches and Scrum Masters as staff positions, not line jobs.

Then, in Part 2, I suggested you mine your experience to move to a line job, so your value is obvious. I ended that with your assessment of your technical skills. That's the first step to turning your experience into a line position. I assume you have some sort of functional product development expertise. If not, why are you in technical product development?

Functional skills are not nearly enough. This post is about your deep domain expertise, first in product, then in agility.

Assess Your Product Subject Matter Domain Expertise

There are at least two kinds of domain expertise: the product itself, and agile/lean expertise. First, the product-based expertise.

If you can read code and understand the product from the inside out, you have solution-space domain expertise. I expect anyone who touches code to have solution-space expertise. Many testers and UX people also have solution-space expertise, because they understand, from a deep level, how the product works.

If you can assess the product from the outside in, you have problem-space domain expertise. I expect anyone who understands what customers value and expect to have problem-space expertise. That's often product people, testers, and some UI/UX people.

These are generalities and we all know how bad generalities are at describing the skills of any one person.

The more collaborative your team, the more everyone can gain both kinds of expertise. For example, if your entire team mobs/ensembles every day, every member of your team probably has both kinds of expertise. Or, if you work by component teams where everyone focuses on their siloed function, no one person might have sufficient solution-space or domain-space expertise. Everyone just sees their part, not the entire product. (But that's a different post.)

Remember, it does not matter whether your team is in R&D, Engineering, or IT. If your team has a customer, you're doing some form of product development. Successful product development teams require both solution-space and problem-space domain expertise to create a product the customers want.

Now, if you want a job where you focus on using your agile skills, assess your agile subject matter expertise.

Assess Your Subject Matter Domain Expertise

What do you know about agility in general?

All the agile approaches, including Scrum are a subset of lean thinking. Have you read the Kanban guide? If not, read it now. And if you're using Scrum, have you read the most recent version of the Scrum Guide?

Too many agile coaches and Scrum Masters have not read either guide.  I don't see how you can say you're using a framework or method without reading the defining documents, but maybe that's me.

However, hiring managers expect deep agile expertise that connect to the Pirate metrics. (These managers might not know how to ask for what they want, but that's what they want.)

Here are some ideas that might relate your agile experience and expertise to value:

• How you've used the flow metrics while supporting a project and/or the managers.
• The conditions in which you've used flow efficiency thinking to help the team and/or the managers collaborate more.
• How a team chose retrospective outcomes for their next bit of work. (That idea of inspect and adapt based on learning.)
• Any recent team-based experiments and the results of those experiments.
• The frequency of the team's demos, who conducted them and how, and the audience for those demos.

I could continue, but I will stop there.

Deep agile subject matter expertise does add value to a team. But surface “expertise”? That add little to no value.

Assess Your Previous Agile Expertise and How it Added Value to Your Previous Teams

When I speak with unemployed agilists, they often tell me they have many certifications. And too many of those certification classes don't discuss how Scrum is a subset of lean.

Many of these unemployed agilists are victims of the Agile Industrial Complex. Their “Mastery” certifications occur after a two-day class where they played games but did no product development. Or, these people are life coaches who got jobs “facilitating” teams, when they have no sort of product or agile domain expertise. Some of them are Jira jockeys. (Apologies to my Atlassian colleagues and friends.)

Life coaches have no place at work. And Jira jockeys add zero value to the team or the organization. (These actions might placate senior leaders, but they have zero effect on customers.)

That's why managers think these people offer little to no value. Worse, if you are also unemployed, you can't easily differentiate your experience from people with light agile expertise.

Here's what you can do right now to increase your value:

• Read the various guides, especially the ProKanban guides and other resources over there.
• If you want to use Scrum, read the Scrum Guide. There are plenty of other free resources that will help you with Scrum.
• If you are a life coach, stop trying to inflict help on people at work. If you have not yet read Bob Galen's Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching (my Amazon affiliate link) or his Agile Coaching Collection on leanpub, read that now.

(Yes, you should read any and all of my books, too.)

Then, practice your agility in your job search. The final post will be a discussion of how you can use your adaptability and agility as you proceed through your job search.