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
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
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.
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?
