top of page
Writer's pictureThe Virtual Agile Coach

Broaden your Agile Coach horizons with these 10 certifications

Updated: Jan 25, 2023

Level up your Agile Coaching skills with these






I've recently been sharing a lot of resources to help people with their professional development. This one is for Agile Coaches;


Broaden your Agile Coaching horizons with these 10 certifications

Not sure where to go next on your Agile Coaching journey? Try one of these

I've intentionally chosen a mixture of frameworks & certifying bodies. This will widen your knowledge, enabling you to take an agnostic view

The below modules are part of the Certified Agile Leadership pathway for which there are no pre-requisites.






🧠 The foundations of agile leadership. You'll learn the behaviours and mindset of an agile leader and develop your confidence in leading agile change and transformation.


Learning outcomes;


- Understanding Why New Thinking And Approaches Are Required For An Increasingly Complex, Unpredictable And Volatile World.

- A Different Type Of Leadership

- Self, Situational and Social Awareness

- Growth Mindset

- Respectful Engagement


🧠Using case studies and models, develop your skills in bringing about sustainable agile change to an organisation


Learning Outcomes


- The Importance of Leadership and Culture in Enabling Agility

- Organizational Design, Constraints and Enablers

- Organizational Change


A combination of CAL-E + CAL-O can act as a pre-req for a more advanced peer driven course in CALII.

The below courses are for intermediate coaching practitioners with a minimum of 6 months coaching experience. Most of them feature on the Agile Coaching track in the centre.







🧠Framework agnostic. You'll learn the power of facilitation whilst picking up tools & techniques for both designing and facilitating effective meetings.


Learning Outcomes


- Development in the Agile Coaching Discipline

- Coach as a Facilitator


🧠This built & strengthened many of the foundations of my agile coaching skills. I picked up a number of new tools for my arsenal alongside a renewed focus on contracting and creating safe environments.


Learning outcomes


- Development in the Agile Coaching Discipline

- Coach as a Professional Coach

- Coach as a mentor

- Coach as a Teacher

- Coach as a Team Coach

- Set boundaries for Agile Coaching



🧠 This will teach you how to reframe problems into outcomes and zoom out to take a systems thinking approach to agile change. Essential learning in my eyes for agile coaches


Learning Outcomes


- Systems Coaching as a skill for leaders and agile coaches

- Coaching the system

- You as a coach

6. KMP - Kanban Management Professional




🧠 Awarded on completion of two classes Kanban System Design & Kanban Systems improvement totalling 4 days - This will help you to design, evolve & scale Kanban


Kanban Systems Design

  • Understand the basics, motivation, and benefits of The Kanban Method.

  • Experience flow in a simulation of a Kanban system.

  • Learn how to run the Kanban meetings to focus on the work and allow the team to organize around it.

  • Build and design a Kanban system using the STATIK approach.

  • Become faster and more responsive, with better risk management and governance.

  • Understand “Pull” systems and how they help reduce overburdening.

  • Learn how to utilize key metrics such as Lead Time, Run Charts, and Cumulative Flow Diagrams to make continuous improvements.

Kanban Systems Improvement


  • Understand the basics, motivation, and benefits of evolutionary change.

  • Scale out your system in multiple directions – upstream, downstream, connected to other systems.

  • Learn how to run the Kanban cadences to manage and scale your system across your organization.

  • Understand the sources of delays, variability, and what you can do to effectively manage them.

  • Identify bottlenecks in a workflow and take actions to improve flow and reduce time to deliver or time to discover.

  • Learn how to utilize key metrics such as Lead Time, Run Charts, and Cumulative Flow Diagrams to guide your continuous improvement using evolutionary change.





🧠 It's the most widely used scaling framework and RTE's are the the voice of agile at the product level.

Even if you aren't necessarily working in a SAFe environment, a strong understanding of scaling methods and transitioning away from multi year planning cycles will be helpful.


Learning outcomes

  • How to lead programs and large solutions in a SAFe organization.

  • How to apply Lean-Agile knowledge and tools to release value.

  • How to foster relentless improvement.

  • How to build a high-performing ART by becoming a servant leader and coach.

ICF - International Coaching Federation

These credentials are some of the most rigorous to gain, requiring a mixture of experience, recorded performance evaluation as well as exams. They are seen as the gold standard for coaching for a reason.




🧠The beginning of your ICF journey, requires a minimum of 60 hours coaching education, 100 hours of coaching experience and 10 hours of mentoring as well as passing your performance evaluation & exam



🧠 Already got your ACC? Continued your coaching journey with PCC, requires a minimum of 125 hours coaching education, 500 hours of coaching experience and 10 hours of mentor coaching as well as passing your performance evaluation & exam




🧠One of the alternative agile scaling frameworks to SAFe. Focuses on principles to practices. Built upon a foundation of Scrum, this will help you with scaling to large product development.


Ben Maynard is a great option for this training


Topics covered;

  • Why LeSS?

  • Scrum, LeSS and LeSS Huge Overview

  • LeSS Rules and Principles

  • Organizing around Customer Value and Feature Teams

  • What is your product?

  • Definition of Done and its impacts

  • Product Owner and Product Backlog

  • Role of Management

  • Organizational impacts and typical LeSS organizational structure

  • LeSS Product Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Review and Retrospective

  • Consideration on technical practices when scaling

  • Integration & Coordination

  • Adopting LeSS in your organization

  • Scrum Master role within LeSS

It's always worth having an understanding of a range of frameworks

What's missing? What training would you include for Agile Coaches?

Share this with someone who might find this useful


 

Looking for an Agile community of practice?






The 'Virtually Agile' Slack community of practice is always welcoming of new members and is growing rapidly. This space intends to be community driven, neurodiverse place where people can share and learn from one another.


You, your colleagues and anyone interested is welcome to get involved.


Sign up here;


Don't stop believin' folks


610 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page