A PST is a Professional Scrum Trainer, and these are the folks who are certified and accredited to deliver scrum training on behalf of Scrum.Org. An organization founded by Scrum’s cocreator, Ken Schwaber, in 2009 to certify and validate a delegate’s knowledge and capabilities in Scrum.
Becoming a Professional Scrum Trainer
It was a toss-up between myself and a close personal friend, Ralph Jocham, as to who would become the first Professional Scrum Trainer in Europe, but I definitely succeeded in becoming the first PST in the UK.
Serendipity
I was working on a consulting job in quiet a sophisticated DevOps environment where we were using Microsoft Team Foundation Server. We were doing fully automated deployments back in 2009, and we needed some verification that what we were doing was the correct and right thing to do.
The financial organization I was working for were using Wintellect and they are one of the world’s foremost experts on Team Foundation Server, so they were a great option for validation.
The person that we were working with, Richard Hundhausen, literally wrote the book on Team Foundation Server.
Richard Hundhausen and I formed a deep connection and a great friendship through the work that we were doing, and he invited me to explore the opportunity of becoming a Professional Scrum Trainer. Richard was working directly with Ken Schwaber to create the first Professional Scrum Master course for Scrum.Org and he thought I would be a great candidate to become a Professional Scrum Trainer.
Connecting with the co-creator of Scrum
I was invited to attend a course in Paris and meet Ken Schwaber and a team of scrum nerds, and we spent the week developing something called the Professional Scrum Developer course. Back then the course was five days long and the focus was on building a working product within that period.
Because I had worked with Scrum in the past, it was a truly powerful experience and resonated deeply with me. It was a wonderful, inspiring week and because I was hanging out with Richard, I got to meet Ken Schwaber and his wife.
We spent some time talking about the future of scrum, product development using scrum, and how each of us had arrived on our particular journey using Scrum, which really inspired me to investigate the Professional Scrum Trainer opportunity on a deeper level and become the first to launch the courses and certification programs in the United Kingdom.
I achieved my Professional Scrum Master certification, training directly under Ken Schwaber in Germany, and this provided a great foundation from which to create and deliver my own future Professional Scrum Master courses in the UK.
After achieving my license to become a Profession Scrum Trainer (PST), the rest is history.
