Why are great Jira admins hard to hire?

[Shana]

Hi Atlassian Community!

I'm Shana, a member of the Jira Software marketing team. I wanted to get feedback from the community on the topic of what makes a great Jira admin.

I've heard from customers (and even some Atlassians who were Jira admins their past lives) that it's hard to find an excellent Jira admin. 

They've said that Jira admins can have a blend of these skills and responsibilities:

• Knowledge of hardware, database expertise, etc - knowledgeable of how to set up and maintain a self-hosted application
• Understanding of agile and software development practices - can partner with development teams and scrum masters to support the way their teams want to work
• Jira and Atlassian knowledge - familiar with the Jira feature set, knows how to configure projects, boards, can dive into JQL, knows where to implement governance and standardization.

What do you think? Do you agree that Jira admins are difficult to hire? What skills do you think are essential to running Jira well at your organization?

[Marynel]

Essential to running JIRA well in your organization? REALLY learn how to listen to people's needs and help them express them in a way that make sense for the team supporting the platform #my2cents

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a good list.  I would add:

• Listening to the users. 
  • Bonus points for being able to easily convert requests into ways to implement it in Jira, or be able to recognise "it can't do it" and "you will need an add-on"
• Saying no. 
  • To people asking for duplicated or useless custom fields, OTT "automations", complex workflows that do nothing more than make them look important, trying to bypass process, and, and, and...
• Communication in general.  Don't be Richmond.  (He's cool, but would not be a good Jira admin)