Become A Freelance Scrum Master And Land Your First Gig In Less Than 3 Months

5 steps to get successfully started

Yes, I know, the title is provocative, and long-time Scrum Masters will be outraged and say: “You can’t become a Scrum Master in 3 months; you need years of experience!” That is true: the more experience you have, the better you can assess situations and the more possibilities you have to support the team efficiently. But every Scrum Master started at some point and has evolved.

If you want to hit the ground running, take three months and do the following five things.

1. Plan your activities and take care of the administrative stuff

Use some of the Scrum practices to plan and get things done over the next three months. First, create a backlog with all necessary activities and always plan for two weeks. Then, reflect after two weeks at the latest.

I am not giving legal or tax advice here. However, depending on the regulations in your country, you will, of course, have to register your business and take care of accounting, taxes, social insurance, etc.

2. Focus on the Basics

There are many books about Scrum and agile working. Please focus on the basics and internalize them.

What should you have read?

• Scrum Guide
• Agile Manifesto
• Book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
• Article: The New New Product Development Game by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka
• Nexus Guide (to get an idea of how scaling works)
• Book: The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay by Zuzana Sochova (tips and tricks for Scrum Masters)

Of course, there are many more. But start with the ones above. After that, you can see what you are specifically interested in and read more books or attend training courses.

Then, think about not only how you can apply agile principles as a Scrum Master but also what you can integrate from it into the rest of your life. For example: What do the Scrum values of openness, respect, commitment, courage, and focus mean to you? How can you integrate them even more into your life and be a role model?

There are also many training courses available. It isn’t easy to assess the quality of the offers at the beginning. Training courses live very much from the exchange between the participants. They are, therefore, more valuable if you have already gained some experience. Then you can bring open questions into the training and better understand what the other participants are talking about. In general, I can recommend the Scrum Master training of the Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org. With the latter, you have to make sure that they are really run by licensed trainers of Scrum.org, because many training courses prepare for Scrum.org certification but are not run by Scrum.org. The quality of non-licensed trainers is very variable.

3. Certifications

Around the topic of Scrum you also hear again and again about certifications. If you want to work as a freelance Scrum Master, it is good to prove certifications. In most cases, training courses are accompanied by corresponding exams. But a quicker way to get certified is through the exams of Scrum.org.

The advantages of the Scrum.org certificates are:

• They are widespread and widely accepted.
• The fee for the exam is reasonable.
• They don’t require attending training.
• It is easy to prepare for them (at least for the level I certificates).
• You don’t have to renew them after a particular time.

I recommend you take the following certification exams after studying the Scrum Guide:

• PSM I
• PSPO I

You can take the exams online, and they cost a small fee. There are free Open Assessments that help you to prepare. Over several days, go through the Scrum Open, Product Owner Open, and Scrum Developer Open assessments again and again until you easily reach 100%. The questions are slightly different for each pass. The PSPO certification is helpful because, as a Scrum Master, you also support the Product Owner. It helps you to understand the Product Owner role better.

4. Networking and gaining experience

Networking is vital to exchange ideas with other Scrum Masters on issues and current trends and establish contacts with potential clients. There are agile meetups in all major cities. Check out meetup.com and search for “Scrum” and “Agile” in your area. There are also online meetups, but face-to-face contact brings considerably more. Meetups are often organized by smaller consulting companies that want to become better known. It makes sense to get in touch with these companies because they usually like to work with freelancers if they need more resources themselves. Talk to them directly, and show that you are enthusiastic about the Scrum Master activities. Ask them if it is possible to support them as an intern, e.g., in workshops or projects for free or at a low hourly rate. You shouldn’t work for free for too long, of course, but if you have no previous experience as a Scrum Master, think of it as on-the-job training that costs you nothing but your time.

5. Let your profile shine

Freelance Scrum Masters are often searched for via advertisements on project boards. Most of the advertisements are made by personnel service providers. Since the recruiters usually do not know you personally, your profile must be easy to handle for them.

The project profile you offer is a CV with project details added. It should contain the following:

1. Name + title stating your role (Scrum Master)
2. Contact details, photo
3. Education/studies
4. Foreign languages
5. Skills
6. Short overview of your previous professional stations (employer, self-employment, etc.)
7. Project history with each

• Date from — to (month/year is sufficient)
• Role
• Project short description (in 3–5 words what it was about)
• Your main tasks
• Skills you used
• Tools you used (e.g., Jira, Azure DevOps, Miro)

In the beginning, you won’t have a project where you were Scrum Master, but try to list everything that could be helpful here. For example, maybe you’ve been a Project Manager or Business Analyst. Have you worked as a Developer in a Scrum Team? Have you interned on a team?

Unfortunately, when you respond to postings, it’s widespread not to hear back. So don’t be frustrated. Often service providers contact you directly if you have a public profile. You don’t need to have your own website, but it makes sense to post your profile in the appropriate project databases. For Germany, Freelancermap and Gulp have proven themselves. If you register with the project databases, you will also receive regular newsletters from them with tips and tricks and market analyses (e.g., information on current hourly rates).

A well-maintained LinkedIn profile is also advantageous.

Summary Take three months and focus entirely on your future job as a Scrum Master. Do the following:

• Register your business if applicable and get the paperwork in place (if you are not currently self-employed).
• Use some of the Scrum practices by yourself for the next three months to get started.
• Read relevant guides/books.
• Take the PSM I and PSPO I exams.
• Network and seek cooperation with small consulting companies.
• Set up your profile in project databases / on LinkedIn.

Do you want to start 2023 as a freelance Scrum Master and need more support? 🚀 Subscribe to my coaching/mentoring package now and get the help you need.🚀