what's next after Jira administrator?

[Sakina]

hi, everyone, i have been administrating (Cloud) Jira software and the confluence with some addon for 3.5 years. I want to advance in my career can any body guide me on what are the option for me

[Tim Eddelbüttel · Accepted solution]

That's a good and tough question because the answer for me would depend also on your professional background (e.g. IT or business related).

As Cloud is a SaaS offering, compared to on-premise a full stack administrator would be touching less areas. Simply think about all these infrastructure things that are necessary to keep it running, securing it, keep it updated, debug issues, implement workarounds, dig more into Java itself, etc.

But these are now the responsibilities of Atlassian for Cloud. A Cloud administrator has limited power as he simply can configure the product only from UI and if there is no error in the front-end he will never see the issues that are visible only in the backend.

Depending on your expertise you could as an example start looking into extending the product by custom development. You could also become an in-house consultant / expert in that area and start to implement more and more processes into Jira. But this really depends on the size, structure and willingness for change in your current company. Has it 100 or 10000 employees. The challenges & complexities are different. 

So to say, look at the specific topics in Jira & Confluence that gets you attention.

If you just created Jira Software projects for agile teams and you're interested in understanding what the hell are they doing... Then something with agile could be also an option.
If you like creating beautiful pages in Confluence... Well maybe Intranet / internal communication could be a path. If you like to understand and optimise business processes independently of the tool then you could think about process management.

When you think about a career path, try to not focus only on the tool itself. Think about specific topics that get your interest as these will help you to grow also independently of Atlassian. 

In my opinion, certifications are a way to proof your knowledge, but are more or less worthless if you're not work as Consultant or you don't look for a new job opportunity.

[Sakina]

hi @Tim Eddelbüttel  thanks for providing details Appreciated.As on my Professional background i had been a Software engineer previously. 

[Benjamin · Accepted solution]

HI @Sakina ,

There's many areas you can go. It depends on what you like to do and what your other skills sets you like to continue to work on. I see above you were a software engineer. You may want to consider software engineering for custom add-ons vendors, Atlassian customization or even build your own add-on. This way you can combine your 2 skills set with the understanding of the how the software application works and coding. 

-Ben

[Rilwan Ahmed · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sakina ,

If you think you have enough skills, its better you take up the Atlassian certifications. Also there are many products by Atlassian and you can start exploring each of them. 

I would suggest start with Jira service Management. 

[Sakina]

thank you @Rilwan Ahmed for your advice , i will Look into it