Atlassian Certified Master: A pleasant journey through Atlassian Certifications

Ivan Lima
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 10, 2020

Perhaps, everything had subtly happened to me ten years ago when I realized that Atlassian was an integral part of my life. Not only was I using the tools daily at work but educating others on how to collaborate with them. I guess it was a natural path to land at an Atlassian solution partner.

From that moment on, when I began my role at iTMethods as a Consultant about two years ago, given the number of challenges imposed by our customers, I understood that it would be a natural learning process to achieve my Atlassian Certified Master status.

 

My certification paths

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As most of my experience was related to the agile ecosystem, as my first certification, I decided to register for ACP-300, Atlassian Certified in Agile Development with Jira Software. Right after that, a month later, I took the ACP-600 exam, Atlassian Certified Jira Project Administration. This second certification was also a logical choice due to my background of being an Atlassian superuser for a long time.

Then, with my energy devoted to providing consulting services to global clients around our DevOps SaaS platform on AWS, focused on the Atlassian stack, I began feeling more confident to take the ACP-100 exam, which is a tough one. Again, as I did with the ACP-JSW, a month later, I ended up taking the ACP-400 exam. Nowadays, aware of the difficulty level of each one, I would have done the other way around. I would have taken the Jira Service Desk before the Jira Administrator exam.

Six months later, I registered for the ACP-200, Atlassian Certified Confluence Administrator exam, which I have recently taken from home due to the COVID-19 situation. By the way, as an aside, due to COVID-19, you can request exceptions to take ACP exams with online remote proctoring. You can learn more at

I found the ACP-200 the toughest one so far. Atlassian indeed does an excellent job of elaborating challenging exams. However, during the preparation process, I also realized how most of us underuse the potential of Confluence, its macros, features and customizations available to users and administrators.

 

Training and preparation

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Indeed, I have enrolled in the respective exam preparation courses and followed the overall recommendations you will find at each certification page. The truth is, nothing beats hands-on experience. To me, the key to passing in the first attempt was the hands-on across all the topics, concentrating on aspects that I used to work less often.

In my case, as iTMethods is an Advanced Consulting & Managed Services AWS Partner, I leveraged AWS to install my Jira Software, Jira Service Desk and Confluence instances. Therefore, I have had my environment up and running so that I could play with all apps to make sure I was not missing anything.

Not to mention that everything that I do, I use Trello to organize, plan and follow-up. That would not be different from my certification goals. Perhaps, this can be a future post/article dedicated to exploring my detailed certification plan using Trello. For now, I leave you with a taste of my boards.

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What's next?

To conclude, to me, the Atlassian Certified Master represents a big step in this learning process that never ends. I am looking forward to the next one as well as keeping active in helping the community - which is a lot of fun!

 

What about you? How's your preparation going?

2 comments

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Kat Warner
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
April 17, 2020

I recommend you write one article per course/Trello board. The series would be a huge upgrade to the four 10-week study guides I wrote last year.

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Ivan Lima
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 17, 2020

Thanks for your recommendation. I've read some of them before and it's actually a great idea. I'll make sure to revisit the ones around the guides that you wrote to get some insights for my next discussion. 😊

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Julia Choi June 15, 2022

I’m new to Jira but not project management. Do you have any course recommendation to get started with Jira, especially integration of software and work management? I’d like to work on certification in the process of doing so as well. Thanks! 

Ivan Lima
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
June 17, 2022

Hi @Julia Choi; you will find plenty of good resources here in the community. I'd suggest joining the Training & Certification group if you haven't done it yet and exploring the content. Another good place to explore is Atlassian University, where you can find free training courses and learning paths to get certified. Personally, certification-wise, I like to download the exam topics and check all the boxes by reviewing the Atlassian documentation and testing as much as possible in a lab environment—nothing beats hands-on experience. 😉 

I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3HwEaejNAU; you will get great insights into Managing Jira Projects Certification. I'm sure @Jimmy Seddon will keep posting videos on his channel with great content around training and certification.

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Jimmy Seddon
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
June 17, 2022

@Ivan Lima Thank you for the plug!  I can neither confirm or deny that I have more certification content already on my channel and/or more coming ;)

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