“Which agile skills are most in demand in today’s workforce?”
It was this question that Scrum Alliance and Business Agility Institute jointly set out to answer in their just-published report, “Skills in the New World of Work.” This 26-page report is chock full of useful data on what employers look for in employees today.
The first thing we can acknowledge is summed up nicely in the opening words of the report: “Agile has won. In technology and product teams, it has become an established way of working in millions of organizations.”
It is no longer a question of “If agile skills are needed,” it has become a question of “What agile skills do you need?” and how those skills weave in with the other critical skills employers seek.
The key findings in the report list Agile Acumen as the second most demanded functional skill employers seek, second only to Technical Skills. Agile Acumen is “the deep understanding of and experience with agile principles, practices, and frameworks."
The report classified skills into two categories: Human Skills and Functional Skills.
Human Skills are commonly referred to as soft skills and cover how people interact effectively with one another.
Functional Skills are specific knowledge and abilities needed to perform a particular task or job.
The full list of nineteen skills can be seen in the graphic below. In addition to Agile Acumen and Technical Skills, the Human Skills of Communication, Teamwork & Collaboration, and Attitude Behaviors round out the top five most sought-after skills by the surveyed employers.
The list isn’t all that surprising and aligns with other surveys and research. A March 2023 LinkedIn top ten list shares at least four skills directly with the "Skills in the New World of Work," and a perusal of other reports shows many of the same skills coming up repeatedly. While Agile Acumen isn’t mentioned in these other reports, skills associated with agile come up with surprising frequency.
While you could just start at the top of the list and work your way down, the report provides some insight for focus in skill areas. What areas should you focus on as a professional working in an organization leveraging agile principles and practices?
Agile & Coaching Skills: Agile organizations can quickly identify and capitalize on new opportunities. They need people to bring this experience to their business and product teams.
Communication: The skill to effectively convey your thoughts and ideas to others is the most sought-after skill by all employers. While hard to quantify, it is still in demand by 62% of the surveyed employers. The report groups Communication with Emotional Intelligence and Empathy (25%) and Influence (24%).
Broader Business Skills: with the Product Leadership skill, we highlighted that businesses must generate sustainable profit to survive. This requires freedom, flexibility, and resilience to create sustainably profitable solutions.
The disturbing trend from the report is that employers are looking for people with multiple deep skill capabilities, typically deep technical skills followed by one or more key skills from the list.
When looking at this data, we need to remember the famous Henry Ford quote, “If I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse.”
While employers are looking for employees to be more efficient and do multiple jobs, we need to help them realize the consequences of efficiency over effectiveness.
While some skills can logically be combined, such as Technical Skills and Product Design & Analysis, employers continue to push the envelope for what they seek, trying to find the “perfect” blend of skills to get the most out of a single employee. It should not be surprising that 65% of employers rate their difficulty in finding these “unicorn” employees as 4 or 5 out of a scale of five in difficulty.
Quantitative and qualitative research has shown us that merging jobs results in lost time to context switching, longer task durations, and higher error rates. In short, asking someone to be a scrum master and a software developer is fiscally unsound.
As a community, we need to help employers understand that a scrum master or agile coach is already a multi-disciplinary employee and what their actual value to the organization is.
Scrum Alliance has staunchly supported the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel open-source movement. Its mission is to “professionalize the world of agile coaching,” which effectively translates into creating a common definition of skills and a competency framework for growing those skills.
When we compare the key skills identified in the "Skills in the New World of Work" report to that of the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel, we find strong synergies.
Agile & Coaching Skills:
Communication:
Broader Business Skills:
The good news is you already have a framework for future-proofing your agile career. By leveraging the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel and connecting that to targeted education, such as the Certified Agile Facilitator workshop, you can map out a learning path that will keep you relevant in this new world of work.
Get the data, insights, and key findings revealed in this recent survey and report. Please complete the form below.
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