Highlights of the 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report

The recently published 2019 Scrum Master Trends report has a few interesting takeaways. The report is the result of a global survey of Scrum Masters conducted by Scrum.org and The Age of Product. The survey included 2100 Scrum Masters from 87 different countries. The highest representation was from Europe (45%) followed closely by North America 32%. You can read the entire report here on the Scrum.org site. test

Key Takeaways – Scrum Master Salary

For me, the most interesting parts of the survey results were related to how much Scrum Masters make:

• Women in the Scrum Master role make more than their male counterparts.
• Higher salaries correlated with training and certification.
• The highest paid Scrum Masters are in Australia, New Zealand and other Oceania countries at $149K, with the second highest average salary being the US at $113K
• Those Scrum Masters with training and certification had higher salaries than those without
• 32% of the Scrum Masters in the US made over $125K

Additional Highlights from the Scrum Master Survey

Below are some other highlights from the 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report:

• 83% of respondents have completed Scrum Training, and 85% had some type of certification
• The top 3 certifications carried by Scrum Masters were PSM1 (53%), CSM (33%) and PSPO1 (16%) [IMHO the the high number of Scrum.org certifications is probably sampling bias for Scrum.org members]
• 45% of respondents had more than one certification though having more than one certification did not correlate with higher salaries
• Women in the Scrum Master role are paid more than men. Though 29% of the respondents were female, there were a larger proportion of females to men in the higher salary ranges.
• Half of Scrum Masters are 40 years old or younger while the other half are over 40
• Half of the respondents claimed that were using one or more scaling frameworks, with breakouts as follows: 23% SAFe, 10% Nexus, 9% LeSS, and 2% DAD.
• They reported current roles as Scrum Master (42%), Agile Coach (13%), Both SM and Coach (23%) and neither 21%.
• A full 58% of respondents had participated in some form of “agile transition”
• Scrum was found to be used with other agile practices including Kanban (81%), DevOps (55%), Test Driven Development (34%) and Extreme Programming (27%)

I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to this Scrum Master survey.

If you are a Scrum Master, you might find the related articles listed below helpful. Interested in becoming a Scrum Master? Please check out our Scrum Master Certification Training page.