I have spent much of my career using agile ways of working, across organisations and teams of very different shapes and sizes. I have mentored colleagues, sponsored apprentices, and spent more time than I care to admit talking about the value of a well‑run stand-up. Until recently, I thought I had a pretty clear sense of who I was professionally.
Then I signed up for a “Train the Trainer” programme, and something shifted.
This blog is about that shift. It is about what it means to move from practising agile to teaching it, and about what that experience revealed to me about where I want to take my career next.
It also showed me how teaching agile can contribute to wider digital capability across the Civil Service. Foundational agile skills will play an important role as we work towards having 1 in 10 civil servants in digital or cyber roles. I also learned that peer-led training is an effective route to upskilling.
Learning to teach
The ‘Train the Trainer’ programme itself was straightforward in concept. A mixed team of Senior Delivery Managers and colleagues from the Capability team were trained by TPX Impact, a specialist training provider, to deliver ‘Digital and Agile Basics’. This was a full‑day training session designed for DBT colleagues who want to better understand how digital and delivery teams work. The idea was to combine subject matter expertise with training craft.
For me personally, there was another layer to this venture. I wanted to find out whether I could do this. Could I stand up in front of a room and genuinely help people understand something I care about deeply? And, quietly, I wanted to find out whether it was something I would enjoy.
As Delivery Managers, we are already used to explaining complex ideas and facilitating discussions. This made the transition into training feel less unfamiliar than I was expecting.
The experience
The core training materials were developed by TPX Impact. Tash Wilcocks and her colleague, Eva O’Brien walked us through the content during the Train the Trainer sessions. The material itself was well thought through, but a full day of training is never just about slides.
Delegates ask real questions that take you off the slide deck and into the more complex territory of lived experience.
There was one moment that I keep coming back to. The slides provided an overview of different agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban and SAFe. One delegate wanted to go further. She did not just want to know what these approaches were. She wanted to understand when you might choose one over another. When would Kanban make sense? When would Scrum be a better fit? What about hybrid or more predictive approaches?
The materials only went so far, so I went off script.
I have worked extensively with Kanban and Scrum, and have developed training on them myself. I was able to talk through real scenarios. For teams with a continuous flow of work and no natural sprint rhythm, Kanban often fits better than Scrum. In highly regulated environments with fixed requirements, a more predictive approach can sometimes be the right tool. At scale, across multiple teams, frameworks like SAFe can help, but they come with overhead. It is important to be honest about whether that structure is actually needed.
I was not reading from a slide. I was talking from experience. The delegate nodded, asked follow-up questions, and was clearly engaged. When my colleague Andy and I debriefed afterwards, he picked out that moment specifically. He could see that something had clicked.
That was when I thought: this is what I love doing. Not just delivering agile but helping people understand how to apply it in their own context.
Upon reflection afterwards, I realised that drawing on experience to help others understand how to apply agile in practice is something delivery professionals do every day.
What the feedback told us
We have now delivered 5 full sessions, and feedback from delegates has been genuinely positive. People said the day felt engaging, that energy levels stayed up across all 6 modules, and that they left feeling they had learned a lot. This is not a given for a full day of training. It shows we did something right.
Delivery Managers spend much of their working lives facilitating. We run workshops, manage complex stakeholder conversations, and help teams navigate difficult discussions. Those skills translate directly into a training environment. Being able to read a room, adjust the pace, and respond to what people need in the moment makes a real difference. Subject matter expertise adds another layer. Together, that combination worked well.
What this tells us is that our experience can be replicated elsewhere in the Civil Service. With the right support from capability colleagues, delivery professionals providing peer-led learning opportunities is not only viable, but valuable.
What I learned about myself
For some time, I have known that I want to move towards agile coaching. That sense crystallised while I was studying for my Project Management Professional qualification, which covers both traditional and agile approaches. During that course, I noticed that while others gravitated towards planning and structure, I kept being drawn towards the people side of the work. How do teams work well together? How do you build trust and psychological safety? How do you create environments where people are able to say honestly when something is not working?
That is the part of the work I find endlessly interesting. It is also what agile, at its best, is really about.
The Train the Trainer programme gave me something concrete to point to. Not a job title, but an experience. I stood up in front of a room, answered unscripted questions, adapted in the moment, and helped people make sense of something complex. That built my confidence more than any qualification on its own and has encouraged me to consider a future in coaching. I have realised that when I teach, I learn.
It also reinforced the value of foundational agile training, not just in theory but in practice. People ask better questions and connect the ideas to their own work when they can engage directly with someone who has experienced it first-hand.
Moving forward
For me, teaching Digital and Agile Basics confirmed that agile training is not just about knowing the methods, but helping others to apply them with confidence. More importantly, it showed me that the skills many of us use every day in delivery roles are exactly the skills needed to start coaching others.
If you work in delivery, using facilitation and communication skills, you may be better prepared for teaching or mentoring than you think. Opportunities like this build capability in others and help clarify what you want from your own career.
If you are considering your career direction, look for ways to share your experience. You might find, as I did, that helping others learn is what helps you move forward.
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