Looking for a .... mentor

[Kerri Bailey]

Hi Pros- 

So... this is me, standing in front of an empty screen, asking someone to mentor me. :) 

All jokes aside... I have been using Jira/Confluence for about a year and a half as a CSM. I'd really like to start working towards certs- I feel like this would best help me increase my knowledge. That being said, there is so much info out there I would love to find someone who is MUCH more experienced than I am (which prob wouldn't take much) to mentor me through this process. 

What do you say... any takers? 

[Gal Fatal · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kerri Bailey 

I can help you with the certifications.

See my article My Journey to be Atlassian Certified Expert 

Feel free to contact me if you need.

Good luck 

[Kerri Bailey]

Thank you @Gal Fatal 

So, assuming that I am just a basic user currently- would you still suggest to follow the path in the article above?

[Cassie the Jira Mechanic · Accepted solution]

I would love to mentor you. Find me on LinkedIn by clicking on my profile here. That being said although I hold 4 certifications, I will tell you I NEVER stop learning. I do think picking a "beast" to focus on and knowing that very, very well is a good place to start. But once you pick your product you want to tackle first, we can set up regular learning mini sessions once a month and I can point you to other learning resources and documentation to learn in between. Additionally, I can always be an ear to sound board questions to and point you in the right direction to self-help when it's an option. Looking forward to sharing some knowledge with an eager learner.

[Kerri Bailey]

I sent you a LinkedIn request and a message! :) 

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

@Kerri Bailey I think everyone that participates in the community would be willing to lend a helping hand.  What certificates are you looking to get?  I would suggest first making a plan on what certs you want.  Take courses in the Atlassian university and then use the community to help mentor you when you have questions on specific topics.  The best way to learn is to get your hands dirty and the Atlassian university courses help you do just that.

[Kerri Bailey]

Hey @Brant Schroeder thank you for applying so quickly. I think that is the thing. I have done the "free" certs that Atlassian offers. But looking at all of the larger certs, I honestly just don't know where to start. Does that make sense? 

[Brant Schroeder]

What cert best aligns with what you are currently doing? What product do you use the most currently?  If you can provide that information I can make a recommendation.

[Kerri Bailey]

@Brant Schroeder so.. I use Jira for creating epcis writing  user stories, testing, etc and for PBI etc and Confluence for documentation as a CSM I haven't done anything around reporting with Jira but honestly I think first, I'd love to better learn what all it can do and get better at setting up projects/linking etc and eventually be able to be the Jira administrator. 

Long term goal... I think would be gaining a working knowledge and proficiency enough to sit for my ACE. I like to continually learn... I want to get to the top of my game within my current capacity and then go from there. 

[Haddon Fisher]

I wish I could get more involved but until I can shift some stuff off my plate, some tips I've picked up along my journey?

1. The certifications are a great way to figure out where to concentrate your studies and once you have them, they prove to hiring managers that you know Jira pretty well. However I have found that most of what I use on a day-to-day basis to get the most out of the tool I learned from experience (usually the hard way). If your admins will let you (or give you access to the sandbox instance if you have one), try to get your hands dirty. Setting up things like projects, workflows and custom fields are one of the better way to begin to see how all of the things fit together.
2. To that end, take advantage of the free Jira (and Confluence) plans; you can up to 10 people on an instance without paying a thing. You can't try everything since some stuff is locked to higher tiers, but all of the foundational stuff is available to play with.
3. Spend extra time in Automation and JQL; regardless of what you end up using your superpowers for, you'll be relying on these.
4. When you run into something you don't understand or doesn't work the way you expect it to, check community; chances are there's at least a couple of posts about it. I usually also check JAC if the question is around functionality or bugs, since these usually make it into here.
5. You mentioned reporting specifically as something you wanted to dig into...this is an area where I've usually had to pull data out of Jira into something like google sheets. It's still very much a work in progress generally, but I am working on converting some of my old documentation and notes into something usable by regular humans and posting it to jiramancy.com. Reporting in particular is an area I want to cover in detail, since it's so useful but also kind of a pain in the @$$. The first piece of this is really dense and inaccessible but if you want to take a look at a way you could do Project Accounting and CapEx reporting, it has an example of how to use Google Sheets pretty effectively.