In this episode, Teacher Career Coach Course graduate, Mark Doctor, shares how he went from being a burned out music teacher to a thriving Scrum Master.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
From Music Teacher to Scrum Master
Daphne:
Hey Mark, thank you so much for being here today.
Mark:
Thanks for having me.
Daphne:
Mark, I always start off asking specifically about people’s experience inside of the education world, what they did as a teacher? I’d love to start there. Tell me a little bit about your journey becoming a teacher and what that was like?
Mark:
Sure. I am the son of a teacher. My mother taught special education for 35 years in the New York City public school system. My cousin’s a teacher, my uncle was a teacher, just a whole family of teachers and felt like a very natural progression for me. I fell in love with music. I knew in high school I was like, I have to study music and a vehicle was through education.
I spent five years in undergrad studying music education. I went back to New York City. I taught for three years all over New York City public schools and doing a bunch of extracurricular activities. The real hustle and bustle of a New Yorker that comes with the territory. And then you have, I want more, I wanted to experience more. I came out to Nevada. I went to graduate school, studied, conducting, and that was a lot of fun.
Spent two years teaching at the University of Nevada and it was a great experience. I taught for a couple years in Las Vegas following that. And I just hit a big road bump, got jaded about some things. And there’s a really heavy weight as a music teacher, as a band director, as a leader over so many students you see every day and see for four years at a time in a high school level or three years at a middle school level, of balancing with the parents and balancing with students’ needs and what you’re trying to accomplish, you’re growing a program and organizing the program. And it got to the point of burnout. I stopped taking care of myself. I really hit mental blocks and it started affecting me health wise. And finally in about October, I finally got to a therapist.
Mark shares what led him to transition out of teaching
I finally got a physical for the first time in a few years. I’m like, you need to change your lifestyle. Something has to change because something’s going to give. And I was working at minimum 45 hours a week upwards to 50, 60 hours, and it was just such a burden. And the contemplation of, well, I love music so much and I really love education and just trying to find a balance just wasn’t happening. After careful consideration with my family and therapists and doctors and my wife and the cats, we really came to the decision that I needed to take a step back and regroup.
Daphne:
One thing I heard you say was obviously your therapist and your doctor were urging you to make a lifestyle change. But you also mentioned that on an average week you were working 45 hours to upwards to 60. This feels very similar to my own story where I found myself at the doctor and now I’m in this completely different role. I can still find myself working 45 to 60 hours if I am really excited about something or we have a big project going on. But I think one of the biggest differences for me is it was just constant, at least low level stress or decision fatigue that those hours, there was never a down moment or a relaxing moment or a moment where I felt like I had time to think or find clarity. Do you feel like that’s how it was in the music space as well?
Mark:
Oh, absolutely. And I think for my particular experience, it was the nights up. I was sleeping maybe two, three hours a night. I’ve always been a terrible sleeper. But to sleep two hours a night and then to have the anxiety going and the record playing just on and on and on, it was always an ongoing thing. Even when I wasn’t at work, I’d go to bed at nine o’clock because I was back at work at seven. And all those waking hours were so devoted to my job and it was so imprinted on me that it dictated my lifestyle and my thought process and was a detriment not only to myself, but to the students I was serving as well.
Daphne:
And it sounds like you had professionals and the support of your significant other. Would love to hear a quick glimpse of what your first reactions were? Were you like, okay, they’re telling me to leave, sure, I got this, I’m going to do it. Or was there a lot of apprehension like, absolutely not, hold on, I can’t. Where were you falling in that spectrum?
Mark:
My wife also is a former music teacher. She also transitioned. We were in this osmosis floating, what are we doing right now, kind of feeling. And it was more of like, oh my gosh, I thought I would make it to the end of the school year. I had more years in, so financially I had the bigger salary that was more living wage, but it was at the point of no you need to leave. And my wife said… and she had come to after school rehearsals and she was very active with the program as well. She said, “You’re just going to drive yourself into the ground and just fizzle out and not have anything left.” And I think that her fear of that burnout and then the acceptance from my mother as well after all her years of teaching of, it wasn’t really a mutual exchange anymore with me and education and the reciprocation of that. It really wasn’t serving anybody anymore and it was time for a change.
Daphne:
It takes a lot of reflection to get through the fear and get to the side of, we have to make this happen. Let’s move forward a little bit to your new role. And now you are a Scrum Master, which we’ll get into what that actually means and everything. But getting to that point, this is one of those roles that I really most of the time say it takes a little bit more elbow grease, a little bit more upskilling. It’s not as easy as a transition, but it is one of those roles that a lot of teachers are transitioning into, project management, Scrum Master. But getting there means that you were probably pretty deliberate about that being a path to apply for it.
Mark explains how he chose his corporate path
How did you get to find that as a career choice and how did you know it was the right one for you during the phase of picking your own path?
Mark:
I spoke with Emily Shultz for our career coaching session and she whipped me into shape. It was I think two weeks after I resigned and she’s like, “Let’s go pedal to the metal. You’re on the horse, we got to get you going.” And that was amazing. She gave me so many resources. I started the P&P. Started to start taking a 35-hour class, and that was mind-blowing. I was like, where was the Gantt chart when I was teaching seven band classes? Where was this? This is amazing. And it was there’s finally definition to the things I was like, I have a drive of folders and things, but it was really cool to get that organization. I was like, these are the things that I really have been doing that for the past decade I really do have a strong skillset in, I just never knew there was this much definition to it.
From there I started asking around. I have family friends who I spoke to that are in product developers and product owners and all other things in Scrum, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. But they had finished their Scrum Master training. They were doing a lot of Agile certifications. So when we spoke they said, “Hey, you should take a look at Scrum Master. You might like it” It was a two-day cert, test at the end with the organization that I did mine with. There’s a bunch of them that are out there, and it was amazing. It was so relatable to the coaching and facilitating of meetings to be in that frontline defense for your team and keeping them guarded from incoming work of, “Hey, we need to have these 15 things done.” It’s like, well, we already have this much capacity and they’re already at their full capacity. They can’t take on another thing. But let’s put it on the backlog and we’ll take a look at it for next sprint to make sure that it gets the full attention it deserves.
And that part has always been super exciting to me because it’s just working with the students and having… well, we don’t have the football field right now. It’s like, let’s flip it up and let’s get in the gym and march in there. What alternatives can we do and how quickly can we make that happen and get the whole team involved? It was a lot of that kind of mindset and that transition that excited me. And I think the biggest thing was, I was very grateful for this from a master trainer that I had because she put the slide. . . she talks about all the different positions in Scrum and then she got to Scrum Master and the first picture was a conductor of an orchestra. And she’s like, “Scrum Master is like the conductor of the orchestra where you have the business comes to them and it goes back out to this other group and then you have the developers come and it goes to the product owners.”
And it was just this orchestration and facilitation aspect that was like, yeah, this is it. This is what I’ve been doing. This is everything I’ve been doing. And I remember the team that I was in, they all messaged me, “Oh my God, you’re a conductor.” It was really funny. Then in that moment I got that acknowledgement. I think that was the first time in this new field that was, oh, I’m a person being treated like this and being recognized for what I’m bringing to the table and my experiences so that was really an amazing experience.
Daphne:
Like the first time that you felt, oh, my skills do translate. I am seeing how my skills really translate. And it sounds like that also came with your call with Emily. And I want to back up a second for people who are not aware, Emily is a former teacher who worked as a corporate recruiter and she works for team Teacher Career Coach, and so people who are inside of the Teacher Career Coach course can sign up for additional one-on-one career clarity calls with her just to see, hey, these are the ideas that I have floating in my head, or this is where I’m feeling stuck, I don’t want to go all in for this one career if it’s not a good fit. And they can start to really pick her brain about the path that they’re taking. I’d love to go back to that call that you had with her.
Mark talks about how his strengths led him to be a Scrum Master
Did you know that you loved productivity and organization? Is that something that you came to the call prepared to talk about?
Mark:
I think so. I think it was kind of, “I heard about project management for the first time.” And she’s like, “Cool, tell me everything you’ve done.” And the second we started talking about music and the organizational aspect of my experience, she’s like, “Yes, let’s go. Let’s do it.” And that’s where the train went. It was like, jump on and let’s go and find out where this leads.
Daphne:
To simplify it, and this is probably the most gross oversimplification, but if someone’s not familiar with project management or Scrum, being a Scrum Master, I always think of, imagine it’s a perfect school district in a completely different unicorn world that does not exist right now, where the grade level leader has full autonomy and is able to actually push back about stuff that doesn’t make sense that school districts are doing. And it says, Hey, it looks like we’re supposed to do this on this date. Let me actually give a date that’s more realistic Now let me delegate. Everybody’s going to do one part of this project so that we don’t all double up and do the exact same things in our own room. And simplifies everything and orchestrates making the projects easier and more efficient, and then making sure everybody gets the supplies that they need.
And that’s gross oversimplification, but do you feel like that’s pretty aligned with what it is? But in that same way, it’s not something that you can necessarily go into an interview and just say, I’m ready to do this job because I was a teacher or because I was a music director. Or you’re going to, in the same way that you couldn’t come into be a grade level leader if you don’t have teaching experience, you’re going to need to really understand how the organization works and how all the team members work to show that you are ready for that particular role. Is that a good oversimplification of it?
Mark:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And especially working in an Agile project management environment, which is very similar to teaching, I think the biggest thing was how does it translate. And in the module NTCC about the translation of the resume and making sure that it comes across the right way. And between bouncing back and forth with Emily and then my connections that I had made, and that helped a lot with getting that to really come across the right way. Where I think one of the other biggest clicks, looking back in retrospect was doing Agile as a graduate student, as a conductor, because I wasn’t responsible to make sure the adults in the room were playing the right notes. I was responsible for my own piece and they were responsible to make music, and it was a collaboration, which is very much like what it is to be a Scrum Master and to be a project manager. As you mentioned, that delegation and re-instituting of work and reorganize any given realistic expectations.
Mark discusses his transition process and timeline
Daphne:
Do you mind sharing how long your career transition process took for you?
Mark:
It took me about four months from resignation in October till first day in February with a lot of applications.
Daphne:
And did you have other interviews for similar positions that weren’t fruitful?
Mark:
Yeah, I had tried a couple of different industries. My mother-in-law is in the show industry. While we were in Vegas she took me around to some shows and that was a lot of fun. That didn’t work out. I know there’s also project manager and even Scrum Master specific roles in finance and insurance. There’s a lot of different industries. Especially now Scrum Master has come so far away from just tech that it has reached out to other industries as well.
Daphne:
I have a friend that works in the construction field and she even works as a project manager in construction. So that title really basically can go almost anywhere with those skills. But you’re going to have to look at the different job descriptions to see what they’re really looking for because they’re going to be a variety of different types of positions. Do you mind sharing a little bit about the interview process as the place where you were hired as a Scrum Master? What was that like? Did they ask you for projects or anything like that during the interview?
Mark:
Where I’m currently working right now, the application process, I started with a referral. I was very grateful that I had somebody who was at the firm currently. At the referral process there was a phone screening interview to start with just to see if you meet cultural things around the firm and then a follow-up interview for a specific project to be on. They didn’t ask me for a specific project. The interview was for a different level position and responsibility. That was a project integration coordination. It was a much more overhead view, umbrella kind of project management role versus a team specific Scrum Master role.
The first five minutes of the meeting was about that other role, and then when they said, “Oh, we see you have a Scrum Master certification, can you talk to us about Scrum and how you’ve used Scrum in your past experience?” And that’s when the floodgates opened. I was like, yeah, we’ve done all these kinds of things and delegating out to students and having all these fantastic opportunities for student led instruction, which really was team led and making all those connections during the interview. Walking out of it was like, wow, I really think this was the one, and it was clear.
Mark explains what helped him through his interviews
Daphne:
Do you feel like you were able to use any of the Teacher Career Coach Course resources to help you study up for the interview?
Mark:
The answer is yes. I think before each major interview, I looked at the processes. Project manager is all about processes. I looked at the process of like, okay, you’re going to go to the interview. Remember to send a thank you by 4:00 p.m. if it was early and then by 9:00 a.m. if it was late. Those kinds of things I used and referenced back to.
Daphne:
And then after they gave you the position, it sounded like it took a little bit of time in between them giving you the position and you starting. How long did the interview process take from starting that first initial phone call screening to actually foot in the door at the company?
Mark:
It was a seven-day process to hear back initially after application, and then it was about a week span from phone interview, main interview, and then an offer. Which came the following Monday, and then it was a two-week process for onboarding. During that two weeks it was the paperwork and things for starting up in a new company.
Daphne:
That’s one of the things that I feel like it varies from company to company. But even that is still a learning experience for people if they’ve only applied for roles in education, just the process itself. It takes a lot longer and multiple interviews, which can be you’re on pins and needles the entire time.
Mark shares what it is like, day-to-day, to be a Scrum Master
Let’s talk a little bit about what your day-to-day looks like in this new role. What are you really doing on a day-to-day basis? Are you in office? Are you working remotely? What does that look like?
Mark:
Well, I am working a hundred percent remote, which I am very grateful for. From a day-to-day a Scrum Master has. . . they’re responsible for what’s called Scrum Ceremonies. Daily standup, which is a 15-minute meeting every day, which just institutes what’s the next 24 hours look like. And gives the teams a chance to collaborate. Really fantastic, especially with remote work. Then there’s sprint planning meetings. We have elaboration meetings for development collaboration, which is meetings with the business. For my project, we do work all very closely with the business. Traditional Scrum would be every two weeks. You meet with the business and have a presentation that’s an increment of a delivery, and then you go back to the table and you work for two more weeks, and you go back and back and forth. We have a very unique experience where the business in involved every couple of days and they’re part of the development process.
In addition to that, there’s a lot of facilitation of meetings, so keeping a time box, making sure that everybody’s staying on task. Making sure that there’s no new things introduced into the sprint that’s going to overwhelm the team like we mentioned before, that keeps them in the bubble to have the best quality of work turned out for that two week increment. Speaking up and what’s called servant leadership. Really just being there to listen, being there to step in when needed.
For instance, if a lead is out, you’re expected to step up and fill those roles and get those releases turned out. That’s been a really fun learning experience that I’ve had over the past couple weeks. It’s a position that is considered the glue work, the things that hold everything together. There’s times that from an education standpoint, the pace is very different. And even at a two-week increment, it feels much slower than what it was like day to day to day to day, six classes a day, eight hour classes a day, and you’re turning and burning the classes like, okay, here we go, I got 200 students in my room today. Versus I have one retrospective a week, and we talk about what we did in the week and we talk about our successes and our growths and how we can grow and what we can do better, and what’s going on this weekend. It’s very different, and having that pace be slower is, I think, so much better mentally, especially on the team, from what I’ve observed to just turn out really lots of quality work.
Daphne:
That’s one of everyone’s biggest fears as they’re told from society, teaching is easy. All you’re doing is hanging out with kids or you’re handing out stickers, you get summers off. And people will say, oh, teaching is such a noble profession, but there’s this undertone of wait until you get in corporate environment. Or people are like, oh, wait till you see what we deal with. And then the vast majority of the time, there’s always an exception to the rule, so I’m never going to say that there has not been people who have reached out and said, I really didn’t like this new role, but it is very, very few and far between.
When the vast majority is, this role sounded intimidating. And then I got in and I was like, oh my gosh, I had so much time to think about this project and I had so much time to research this project and do this, instead of juggling 20 hats at one time, it was just so much more manageable from a mental standpoint. With this role, there’s a lot of project management that is a big heavy emphasis skill you need to have. You need to be able to prove that you’re an organized person, that you’re able to chunk things out in manageable pieces. Is there a big tech component? Are you supposed to be very technology savvy with your specific role?
Mark:
That’s such a wonderful question, and my colleague and I were just talking about this earlier today, who is also a former teacher working as a Scrum Master with the same company. We thought about, the fear of I’m going into tech specific and there’s that. There isn’t much components right now at my current capacity that requires me to look at code. I look at it, but I’m not working on it. That’s really the developer’s role. But my role, like you mentioned, is that project management role, that overseeing role of making sure that we don’t go off task. Making sure that the conversations have to do with the acceptance criteria. Because at times, especially working with developers, they go really into the weeds in a meeting that is meant as a very high level view of what we’re working on versus one line at a time. And there’s a lot of that kind of facilitation of, hey, let’s go regroup back over here and let’s keep going on this path.
Daphne:
But you’re not using complex technology, it’s probably you’re using Zoom for your calls, Microsoft Teams or Slack, maybe a project management tool. Are you doing Asana or Trello?
Mark:
We’ve been using Jira a lot so that was using Elysium and using Trello in my own life and making recipe cards in Trello. And then, oh yeah, I’ve looked at Jira and started to look more and more at that. I know there’s a lot of teams that use Confluence as well because Elysium companies talk to each other or programs talk to each other and things like that.
Daphne:
There’s also Notion that I feel like is a big one in companies, and if teachers are listening to this and you’re freaking out and you’re like, great, now I have to learn six different project management tools, these are things that you can learn a very basic overview with less than 30 minutes of a YouTube video. And they’re not going to expect you to be absolute experts in it because you… more so I think it’s the philosophy around project management that’s going to be more important because this is going to be something that you can pick up more quickly.
Mark:
Absolutely, and for my onboarding, I was given a year’s span of learning. And for Jira, it was like by the end of the first month, do you know how to open it essentially? And then by the end of three months, do you kind of know your way around it? We talked about the pacing earlier. There’s much more acceptance and there’s much more room of error that slowly decreases over time. And that you have to be in your classroom 24 hours and we have eight hours of meetings today and it has to be fully set up, that’s not happening. And I think, as mentioned before, that was one of the biggest transitions that I think I’m still coming through, has been really interesting to experience.
Daphne:
And that sounds like you work at a company that’s well established because not every company has a really robust onboarding program. If you’re going to a total startup, you may be responsible for creating that 30 day, 60 day, 90 day plan, and you may be coming in with nothing or no expectations. There are going to be people who absolutely thrive in that role and love being able to put together that process because that’s still something that a teacher absolutely can do with their transferable skills.
Mark talks about his long-term career goals and what a Scrum Master’s career path can look like
I wanted to talk to you a little bit before we have to go about what does a career trajectory from Scrum Master look like? Where would you go next from this? And I’m sure there’s plenty of pass.
Mark:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you mentioned this much earlier about project management is everywhere. This is one role in many different roles of project management that I’ve really enjoyed because of the Agile delivery, because it felt so relatable to being a musician and being an educator. Right now I’m just chilling as a Scrum Master. It’s been really cool. There’s a lot of different styles of Agile delivery from lean to Kanban Scrum to Scaled Agile. Currently, I’m in a scaled Agile framework, which is essentially little Scrum teams and they’re on a release train, which is called arts, and all of those arts have one solution train and so on and so forth. I’m at the very, very bottom. There’s a path of being a release train engineer, which is a Scrum Master for the Scrum Masters of the little Scrum teams. There’s the solution train engineer, which is the Scrum Master for the Scrum Master for the Scrum Masters. And so it just keeps going like that, that’s really cool.
I’ve also been doing a lot of research and been talking to as well an Agile coach. An Agile coach is somebody who specializes in Agile project management delivery and in the coaching. As a Scrum Master, our focus is very much on the people, while the product owner in Agile is very focused on the project or the product itself, and they work directly with the business. As a people focused role and making sure that everybody’s feeling good, that Agile coach sets the tone of the Scrum Masters on a scaled Agile delivery training or just one-on-one coachings, which I felt is very much so that I did a lot with rising seniors that are looking at college and just didn’t really know what to look at or didn’t feel comfortable with the counselors yet, so we just sat and talked.
Or people have reached out to me, “Hey, how did you transition out of education?” And I had friends just reached out and we talked for a while. Even this week I started doing one-on-ones with my team. Just what’s going on? We don’t really get a chance to talk much because we’re remote, but if we’re in person, I would stop by. Just that very one-to-one, person to person level is really cool. There’s a lot of different trajectories. And once again, it’s still project management and a lot of those skills are so transferable across so many different industries. And it’s really exciting that. I’m very grateful for the experience I’ve had so far and I really look forward to what’s come.
Daphne:
I love how much you’ve talked about how your skills have translated in this role because I feel like it’s made one thing very clear. And that is that there are so many ways that this world and teaching are very similar. And for the last five years, we’ve helped teachers transition out of the classroom, and one of the most common comments on Instagram or emails or DMs that we get is, “Well, everything that you’re posting about looks boring.” And it’s like that’s the person who just starts looking or exploring new careers and they’re judging a book by its title a little bit of, Scrum Master sounds weird and boring. It honestly does.
Mark:
It’s abstract. It’s a very abstract concept.
Daphne:
If you have not been in a corporate environment. And I get that, that’s one of the signs of, you haven’t really watched a 15-minute video of what one of these roles does. And it’s not realistic to watch 15-minute videos of a thousand different roles. But when you first started hearing project management Scrum Master, did you really realize that it was going to light you up in the same way?
Mark:
No. I was like, what is this? I’m like, there goes the performances and the touring and the bus rides and all these things. And it’s like, wait a second, the things that were 90% of my job, because all the things I was doing outside of teaching was all of this already, is my full job that I am paid for and now I have a work-life balance. Where I’m able to go for a run or go kickboxing or go play golf or do something that I really enjoy. Now that we’ve moved recently, I can play my instrument for my own enjoyment right now and trying to get back into what music really means to me and rediscovered that. No, I didn’t think at first that I was going to be so passionate about it until the experiences happened, it happened in the research and the classes and talking with people about it. I feel like I finally lightened up again about something like I used to when I first started out, and that’s been life changing.
Daphne:
I feel like so many people go into teaching because they have this certain desire in their heart to do something and impact other people. And once you release yourself from the identity of being a teacher, you can realize you can still do that and still feel good about what you do in almost any role. Not all of them. There’s got to be a couple roles where I’m like, absolutely not, that’s not going to be a role that lights you up, that’s a terrible role. But for the majority of the roles that we talk about on this podcast, they have all these aspects where you can still do these types of things.
Mark tells Daphne what he has learned about himself through the transition process
The last question I want to ask you, Mark, it is my favorite question to ask people. Because this is one of the scariest, hardest things many people have done, reinvent themselves, leave a career that’s quote, unquote, stable. What did you learn about yourself during this process?
Mark:
I learned that I can really trust myself to make a positive decision for my life. I felt like I was very dependent on, oh, what do you think? What do you think? And I didn’t just trust myself, like I trusted myself to go to grad school and I trusted myself to pursue what I wanted. And it was another one of those crossroads of, well, I can keep doing this thing, or I can trust my feelings and trust my intuition and take a leap of faith. And learning that I can truly trust myself and find people to lean on to support my goal has really had such a big impact.
Daphne:
That is such a good way to explain that feeling that I think a lot of people struggle with at the beginning, is they want to outsource it to literal strangers. They’ll ask a complete stranger on the internet, “Do you think I should leave my job?” When in their heart their gut is, you should absolutely leave your job. You know that you need to leave your job. My therapist has pushed on me where she’s like, that wisdom is inside of you for a reason. You are not a teenager just making things up without knowledge of what you’re capable of. You have to trust yourself and what you are feeling. It’s okay to talk to other people, and it sounds like you taking that risk and learning that lesson about yourself has paid off exponentially. And I’m just so happy that you’ve been here and this has been such a good episode, and I’m just so happy to meet you.
Mark:
Thank you. I really appreciate everything you’ve done, so thank you.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course (If you are a Teacher Career Coach Course member, you can also sign up for our one-on-one Career Clarity calls.)
