Last week was a good week! I finally made some progress with my CTC / CEC application by taking the plunge with the pre-application call. I am pleased to say it went very well. I thought I would document the outline here to help any candidates who are considering booking the call. in the near future
I reached out to Christine Thompson who is one of the reviewers for the CTC programme and arranged a time to meet up to review my application. The call lasted 1 hour in total. In all honesty, I should have done this a long time ago to help me progress towards the certification quicker by finding and covering off my gaps in experience. The CTC review team are there to help candidates meet the requirements before they apply which is a really good way to operate. When I applied for my CSP certifications it felt like you were dealing with a faceless organisation who would review and pass or fail as there was no feedback or human touch there. The ability to speak to someone, have an informal chat about my experience, my gaps and any questions I had around the process has moved me forward a great deal
The basis for the chat is to review the requirements that need to be met in order to obtain CTC. At a high level you need to have :
- Coaching experience – Demonstrate more than 1,000 hours of coaching agile teams or roles, including multiple interacting teams and hands-on experience as part of a scrum team.
- Education and mentorship – Have an active Certified Scrum Professional® certification and the ability to apply agile and Lean values, principles, and practices effectively.
- Professional collaboration – Demonstrate a history of participation and involvement in at least five agile-related events and joining the Candidate-CTC Google group.
I have linked to the detailed requirements here and more importantly the expectations here.
I preferred the call over completing the part 1 application form. Being a more practical person rather than academic, I found it hard to complete the application and the amount of times have written and rewritten answers for part 1 has been scary. Getting nearly 20 years of experience down and into some of the very short word limits is very hard and I struggled to sell myself well, the call is totally different. The call gave me the opportunity to sell myself, describe the journey I have been on the get to this point and to ask Christine what the reviewer would be expecting in some of the sections I was struggling with to make sure I was on the right track which thankfully I was.
Well that is the basics, what did my call entail?
We covered everything here, so it is a good idea to print this out and tick things off ahead of the call.
The most important question was to establish whether I had a valid CSP certificate. I had renewerd my CSP-SM and CSP-PO in November 23 so was fully up to date. This is a deal breaker as if you don’t have a valid CSP certificate that you won’t be able to progress to application.
When it came to the more in depth questions, I cheated a little by progressing on ahead with the Part 1 write up. This was beneficial as questions around community participation, courses that you have attended to build your knowledge (instructor led) and informal knowledge building (books, courses etc) were covered. It is a good idea to sit down and really think about these areas and note everything down in the application to show the breadth and depth of your material and tick that box. I had the page open in front of me luckily which made it easy to rhyme off my learning and community participation but this could throw you if you need to think about it.
The organisation I work in at the moment really invests in the people who work there and I have experienced workshops, guest speakers and training courses that helped broaden my learning, you may be the same so make sure that you note these down, the learning doesn’t need to be certified or instructor led which is something to consider when filling the form out.
We covered my experience and evidence that I have over 1000 hours of Multi Team Coaching experience. The multi team coaching part is important to the CTC certification and you should keep this in mind for part 1 and Part 2 also. The second question I was asked was why I wanted to achieve my CTC. The key here is to be authentic to yourself and the way you describe what is driving you to achieve this milestone. If you are a fan of the scouts and collect badges and fancy a shiny new one, then this answer isn’t going to get you far unfortunately :D. I described the journey I have taken to get here, the mindset shift from where I was at the start of my journey and where I am now and how my thoughts on how I will use this to give back to the community have matured over the past few years. Some things to consider when forming your response too.
The item where I had a gap in was speaking. Scrum Alliance would like to see their CTC candidates out speaking in the community in the past 2 years. I have spoken at a couple of events in the past and it isn’t my strong point but I haven’t covered any speaking in the past 2 years. Thankfully I have something up my sleeve to help me meet this requirement so watch this space so this may be something that you need to consider going forward.
The surprise part of the application for a lot of people is the requirement to be able to have a coaching conversation to demonstrate coaching at the equivalent of ICF-ACC level. Thankfully I have been working towards ICF-ACC in the past year and was able to meet this requirement. Would I have been confident in doing this if I hadn’t been doing the ICF-ACC course, probably not, so it will be something that you will need to work on and practice, practice and practice some more. A good place to prepare for this would be the coaching outside the box blog where you can find some insightful articles to help you on your way or even better, reach out to the team if you would like information on the ICF training courses that they have.
The coaching conversation part of the pre-application can last from 10-30 minutes I have been told. Mine lasted 10 minutes and I was able to complete the coaching arc in that time which I was quite pleased with. I can’t emphasise enough here, find a partner and practice, practice practice if you haven’t gone down the ICF path yet. You don’t need to have the certification, just be in a position to demonstrate the competencies.
Overall I have been cleared to progress with my application and have part 1 ready to submit with a few tweaks off of the back of my call with Caroline. This felt like a weight off of my shoulders and I can’t thank Caroline enough for being an awesome host and giving some great pointers and things to ponder when filling out part 1 and part 2 in due course.
I hope this helps and good luck to those who are progressing down the same path 🙂
Daily Scrum 