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Seeking Advice on Gaining Experience in the Atlassian Ecosystem

Tiffany Lynn Cortez-Machado

Hi everyone!

My name is Tiffany, and I’m a public school teacher looking to transition into a new career. Over the past several months, I’ve been exploring the Atlassian ecosystem, studying for the ACA-900 Jira Software Essentials, and passing the ACA-915 Atlassian Cloud Foundation certifications. I love learning how teams use Atlassian products to improve collaboration and efficiency, and I’m eager to gain hands-on experience.

Since I come from a non-traditional background, I’d love any advice on how to build practical experience. Are there recommended projects, volunteer opportunities, or sandbox environments I should explore? How did you get started in the Atlassian space?

I appreciate any insights you can share! Looking forward to learning from this community.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-cortez-machado/

Comments

Yi Meng

Hi @Tiffany Lynn Cortez-Machado welcome to the community.

I think the first step is that you can get your own Jira cloud instance. It's free to less than 10 users. And you can spend some time play around with it to gain some hand-on experience. Based on your background, you can try to set up a project to manage your work as a teacher in Jira. This could be a good start point.

And you can try to reach out to people in your area who is working as Jira admin, Jira consultant or similar roles through LinkedIn. In this way, you can start to build your network.

Hope this could be helpful.

Good luck and have a great day!

Fun Man Andy

Welcome to Atlassian @Tiffany Lynn Cortez-Machado !!

And wow... what a question... after almost 15yr on Atlassian Stacks at a wide variety of corporations, I am not sure where to start with an answer. 🥹

The easiest questions to answer are:

I got started with Atlassian stack because those are the tools a company I was working for back in 2010 used! The rest is (a very messy) history.
I see you are not too "far" from Austin, and there is a really thriving user group community across all of TX, but especially in ATX.
The upcoming event sounds like it was specifically design for you!
Check it out:
ace.atlassian.com/events/atlassian-austin-jira-for-all-teams-ace-roadshow
(It's also at the big and fancy Atlassian office!)

Bryan Guffey_Middleware

Hey @Tiffany Lynn Cortez-Machado - welcome! My name is Bryan and I'm a Community Events Leader. I also work for a Marketplace Partner, Middleware, as well. I initially came from a non-traditional background - my degree is in musical theatre, so I know your experience well! I also found that I loved helping teams collaborate and being the one who enabled that collaboration.

Now, onto the advice!

1. Start with what you know

You're a public school teacher. Think about the issues you and your colleagues have every day. Now, build out solutions to solve them. As you build them, document how you're building them, and even the decisions you're making along the way.

2. Share what you've done

Use this very community to share what you've done. If you've used Jira, post an article in Jira Cloud group. Confluence has a group too. All the products do! Building your presence in this Community is a great way to get more experience and to build visibility for your work.

3. Attend an ACE

You asked about volunteering, and boy, do I have an answer for you! Atlassian has an entire events program called Atlassian Community Events where people interested and passionate about Atlassian and its products gather to share tips, teach each other products, and learn from individuals working professionally in the Atlassian space. Attending ACE events in your local area is an excellent way to find more opportunities in the Atlassian ecosystem and to meet more people like yourself.

I see that you're a member of the Austin and Houston Community groups, and you're spoiled for options:

Austin ACE has a Jira for all teams event coming up on March 11, (Hey @Larry Brock _Praecipio_ and @suze_treacy)
San Antonio has a Rovo Lab on March 25 (Hey @Amanda Cortez and Larry again)
Houston has an amazing Star Wars-themed Family Fun Day BBQ on a real horse🐴 ranch coming up on May 4 (Hi @Anthony D'Ambrosio , @Joe Zinnecker , @Ben Garcia and Larry again!)

Check any of those out, and I'm sure you'll have an amazing time and meet amazing people!

Now, you asked about sandbox instances. While Atlassian doesn't have any formal sandbox instances, there are a couple options:

Create a new organization and sign up for free trials. Atlassian currently recommends this process when studying and doing hands-on labs, so you're free to do it as often as you like. Sign up, and kick on the Standard and then Premium free trial. When you're out of time, do it again.
Sign up for a developer site. If you're looking to have a more persistent site and you want to play around with a bit of software development (I recommend looking at creating simple Confluence macros using Forge), you can sign up for the Cloud Developer Bundle, which gives you a persistent site with Standard Products and 5 free users.

I hope this helps you get started on your journey! If you ever have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me as well!

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