The Agile Coach Academy was an idea me and Karim explored when we first started Agile Centre.
We had both invested thousands of pounds in courses, books, seminars, and workshops over our decade long journey to becoming an Agile Coach.
Some of those investments were incredibly worthwhile but there was also a lot of wasted time, effort and money in investments that didn’t make the cut.
We had a conversation one evening about how we would love to create an academy that would be exactly what we would have wished for when we first set out on our journey.
We wanted to create an environment that helped grow the next generation of great scrum masters and agile coaches. We wanted to create an Academy that helped significantly reduce the amount of time it would take to become an excellent coach and practitioner.
The Agile Coach Academy is exactly that.
An academy that mentors, teaches, and coaches scrum masters through their apprenticeship and helps to grow confidence, capability, and competence.
To accelerate their development as both a coach and an Agile coach.
It takes years and years of training, coaching and practice to become a competent and respected coach. It is an incredibly difficult skillset to master and is a stand-alone profession outside of the Agile industry.
An Agile coach is a coach that has a significant amount of expertise and experience working in Agile environments. From a Scrum Master through each of the levels of proficiency as a practitioner to a Scrum Professional.
An Agile coach will use coaching techniques, models and frameworks throughout their practice but will also use teaching and mentoring to help scrum teams create environments where they can excel.
Many people develop their agile chops as a Scrum Master and Agile practitioner but don’t necessarily develop their coaching and facilitation skills.
In many ways, this is like a little league coach that teaches people how the game is played and how the rules work but isn’t actively coaching that team to achieve their best performances.
In the Agile industry, there are a lot of people who call themselves Agile coaches after practicing as a Scrum Master for a couple of years but lack the deep coaching and facilitation skills that are necessary to thrive as an Agile coach.
The Agile Coach Academy aims to bridge that gap.
We invest a great deal of time in small, intimate cohorts working through coaching skills, techniques, models, and frameworks. We bring war stories from many years working in the trenches of Agile transformations and scrum environments to help embed the Agile capabilities and competence.
The Agile Coach Academy also offers individuals the opportunity to practice their coaching amongst their peers and learn from each other’s experiences and challenges.
People actively bring their challenges, questions and stumbling blocks to each session and we explore the best opportunities available to them to overcome those challenges and impediments.
We bring our deep knowledge of Agile and Scrum to help grow their capabilities as both an Agile practitioner as well as an Agile coach. A deeper understanding of Agile and Scrum empowers our aspiring coaches to develop their professional coaching skills alongside their professional practitioner skills.
In essence, the Agile Coach Academy is an apprenticeship in Agile coaching that typically lasts around 18 months before progressing into mentoring and coaching sessions on a one-to-one and cohort basis.
Over the 18 months, we help aspiring coaches develop the necessary skills and degree of competence required for them to practice as an Agile coach.
It can take up to a decade of learning, practice, and financial investment to become a skilled and competent Agile coach. We believe we can get you there in a few years for significantly less than the costly trial-and-error approach we had to take when we first set out on our journey.
We have clients that have worked with the Agile Coach Academy for years. As they progress in their journey as an Agile coach, the Academy supports them through their development with coaching, mentoring, and teaching.
It also grows their network of like-minded and similarly qualified coaches.
A rock-solid support team of experienced and aspiring Agile coaches that continue to help each other grow skills, tools, and trusted techniques for working with both individuals and teams in scrum environments.
The Agile Coach Academy offers a 50% discount on any Agile Centre certification programs and has successfully helped individuals make their application for the Scrum Alliance Certified Team Coach and Certified Enterprise Coach certifications.
If you like the idea of a mentored and coach-driven skills development for your journey, visit our Agile Coach Academy page.
If you would like to explore the concept of coaching, visit our on-demand Introduction to Coaching course page.