“You are what you wear”; similarly “Your resume speaks who you are”. Hence building a powerful and effective resume is important for a Scrum Master to secure challenging opportunities in erupted organizations. This article helps you to understand some important tips to create your Scrum Master resume.

Keep it short and simple:

Do not create more than 2 to 3 pages for your Resume. The longer your resume is, the lesser it will be shortlisted. So try to organize your resume within maximum of 3 pages and keep important and critical information on that. You can leave some additional information in the form of web links to your personal website, Linked in profile, or any other source.

Resume sections are the key:

What sections you will keep in your resume is highly important to get shortlisted by the recruiters. Segregating your professional experience into different sections as per their importance is critical. Prioritize the content into Critical, Important and Additional sections and try to fit the Critical information in the first page of your resume. You can consider the following sections under these three categories:

Critical:

  • Executive Summary
  • Certifications
  • Achievements
  • Professional Experience
  • Contact Information (Email & Phone)

Important:

  • Educational qualifications
  • Strengths
  • Tools experience

Additional:

  • Project experience
  • Recommendations

Keep it aligned with the Job Description:

One common mistake most of the people do is, they do not keep their resume up-to-date. They create one version and just share the same for different job openings. This may not really help you. Depending on the job you are going to apply for, the content of your resume should be aligned according to the job description. Referring to the key words used in the Job Description in your resume will get more probability of being picked up by the recruiter. At the same time, do not try to cook up the experience just to match the job description. At the end, you want to be successful in the role if you are selected. 

Objective/Executive Summary should be powerful:

Most of the resumes will be discarded after reading the first section “Objective or Executive Summary”. The reason is, recruiters will have high pressure to fill the positions so they cannot spend a long time going through all the content in the resume. So they first focus on the first section. This section should convince the recruiter on why you are the best candidate for the Scrum Master role.

For example: Instead of mentioning “I am an experienced and certified Scrum Master looking for challenging opportunities to demonstrate my skills”, it will be powerful if you mention “A “CSM” Certified Scrum Master with 8 years of Scrum Master experience, looking to demonstrate my experience in addressing development delays, cost overruns, and improving collaboration and communication within the teams to optimize their performance”

This helps recruiters understand your experience and they will have confidence in your caliber.

“What” is common, “How” is critical:

Majority of the resumes will miss this point. They focus more on “What” they do, but they forget to mention “How” they do “What” they do. If you can clearly explain how you do what you do, the recruiter will have a fair understanding of your skills and experience. You can consider the below examples:

Instead of mentioning just “Facilitation”, it will be nice if you include how you facilitate as given below:

  • Helped Product owner to get consensus in prioritizing backlog items using DOT Voting technique
  • Facilitated Story writing workshop using Story Map technique with Focus Group method

Instead of mentioning just “Coaching”, it will be good if you include how you coach people as given below:

  • Used GROW model to coach on the of the team members 
  • Coached an organizational leader using ADKAR model

Do not mix up roles and experience:

This is one common mistake people make in preparing their resume. They try to mix the experience of various roles like project manager, PMO, Technical Lead, and Scrum Master. This creates confusion in the recruiter and they cannot evaluate your experience as it is focusing on many roles so it leads to diluting the purpose. 

So, if you are applying to a Scrum Master role, then focus on your Scrum Master experience, knowledge and skills. Keep the additional roles details in a separate section just for reference.

Highlight the achievements right way:

Recruiters look for people who are results oriented, so they look for instances of such results in your resume. So keeping the details of your achievements in your existing job in the right way is important. Examples are below:

Instead of listing the below way:

  • Worked as Scrum Master for 2 teams in last 2 years
  • Implemented Scrum framework for 2 teams

It will be better to mention as below:

  • Reduced average Project Length by 12% and the Project Cost by 10% after 2 years of Scrum implementation
  • Improved the “Time to market” by 10% using Scrum framework with 2 teams in last 2 years
  • Improved the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of customer from 35 to 50 within 6 months

How to make statements more powerful in your resume?

Below are some example statements that help you to frame sentences in your resume

  • Guided the Development teams on how to use Agile/Scrum practices with a focus on delivering value to customers.
  • Helped support functions such as HR, Admin, Infrastructure and Network & IT teams to become more agile in their way of supporting Development teams
  • Helped the Development team to become self-organised and cross-functional by creating awareness of the need and creating a roadmap to achieve the same.
  • Conducted Agile Maturity assessment for the team and organisation to help understand the level of maturity
  • Coaching the Development team using models like GROW, WONDER to higher levels of maturity
  • Helped Development teams in removing impediments with a focus on global or systemic impediments and at the same time guided the team to remove team level impediments on their own using their collective experience and knowledge
  • Created a trust based safe environment where problems are exposed without fear of blame, or being judged, with an emphasis on healing and problem-solving.
  • Facilitated the work to be distributed without direct assignment, or dictating the work.
  • Developed Tools to consolidate information and provide dashboard for better visibility to the management
  • Consolidated the tools and techniques to optimize them and bring uniformity within the organization
  • Created organizational impediments board to get attention of management in resolving the Global impediments by bringing the leadership team together.