What is the most common training pathway?

[Mackenziev_web]

Hello,

I am looking to get certified in all things JIRA/Confluence, but I can't do all of the certifications. I am curious to know which training pathways most people take. I have 5 years of Customer Support/Success experience, with heavy JIRA usage in the context of bug triaging, knowledge creation, and dev requests. I'm curious to know how I can bolster my current knowledge. I want to be able to get a JIRA Admin type job. Where should I start?

Thanks!

[Dietmar Doerschlag]

Hi there. That is a broad question and not that easy to answer to be honest as it really depends on your career goals and the job you are performing currently. Here are some pointers. 

1. Do you want to get certified in Jira Software (JSW) or in Jira Service Management (JSM)? Which of these two products do you use currently? Knowledge creation relates to Confluence which is more tied to JSM than Jira. By the way, there are no more certifications available (at least currently) for Confluence, to my knowledge.

2. If you strive to obtain a certification in Jira, my recommendation is to go for the ACP-620 (Jira Cloud Project Admin first). It is not as broad and easier to obtain than the Jira Admin certification. After you master the ACP-620, I would set my goals on the ACP-120 (Jira Cloud Admin) which is more broad and also more difficult.  If you want to go for Associate certifications, check them out, they are less demanding and easier to obtain but I am personally not familiar with them.

3. If you want to get certified in Jira Service Management, I suggest to start with the ACP-925 (JSM Agent Essentials) which is relatively easy.  You can also go for the ACP-420 (JSM Project Manager) which I personally found to be the most difficult exam of all. 

Hope this helps for starters. Good luck on your certification journey. 

[Mackenziev_web]

helpful thank you!

[Allen Chen]

Hi @Mackenziev_web ,

Welcome to the community :)

ACP 120- Jira Admin for Cloud could be a good one to start.

After that, based on your experience and interests, you may want to consider taking ACP 420 - Managing Jira Service Projects for Cloud.

[Bharat Kalia]

Hello Mackenziev, 

Hope you are doing well. I was on the same boat as you few years before as I was working in Application Support for almost 5 years before starting as a Jira admin. Now, I have 3 certifications under my belt. Here are few tips that you can take to start with some certifications - 

1. Since you are a heavy Jira user you can always start with - ACP-120   to prepare for this course you can go through the Atlassian course and keep your hands on practice on Jira. I also took the udemy course for this exam, which helped me a lot since this was my first Atlassian exam. This course and exam will definitely boost your confidence. 

2. The second exam would be ACP-620  which will help you understand the project admin side of Jira projects. 

I would start off with these two certifications for now and see how you feel about exploring the other certifications with time. Usually, a gap of 2 months in each certifications help in preparation and booking in advance with a date in my mind always helps me with the goals. 

I hope it helps!!

Thanks,

Bharat 

[Mikolaj Umiastowski]

Just an account of what I personnally did, when I was in the same situations than you, in the past few weeks. 
I had no cert. at all. 
I begin wth some associate certs to get acquainted with the kind of exams and questions. 
I did them online, as it is just one hour long, and I even needed 20 mns sometimes.

Then I did project management with jira (3 hours long), and then jira admin (which is of course the most valuable) => 3 hours long also.
Those 2 ones I passed them on site, because the online exame is quite strict : you cannot have a pencil and paper, you cannot speak to yourself.... you are more relaxed when it's on site. And it really matters.
As I had some money to spend I could do it gradually and it worked.

It requires a serious preparation, doing the free courses and the sample questions provided on Attlasian University, and I did some sample questions from Udemy (but just for on cert).

When I look back, perhaps I should have tried to take the jira admin before the project management, because the Jira admin is where you really work on the hard stuff, so it can be good to dive into it quickly if you're in a hurry.

I hope it helps!