Study Tips: ACP-120 Jira admin for Cloud and ACP-520 Atlassian Cloud Org Admin

John Price
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September 13, 2024

I have been a Jira admin for years and also was lucky enough to set up the Atlassian Org for my company, so after taking the prep courses I was able to score 94% on both tests. If you have less experience, take heart - you only need about 62% to pass!

Start by looking at some of these past answers for tips:

By far the two most important things are:

  1. Hands-on admin experience with Jira Cloud.
  2. ACP-120 Jira Administration for Cloud Exam Success / Administer Atlassian Organizations learning paths

I will also talk about tough areas and tricky questions. Ok, let's break these down.

Hands-on experience

If you have not been a Jira/Org admin as part of a job, you'll have a tough time, since repetition in setting up projects and so forth is key to learning. However, you can and should set up your own cloud site (myname.atlassian.net) and spend time with that. A default Org with the same name will be created. You should also set up at least 3 users with different personal email addresses:

  • myname@gmail.com - Org Admin
  • anotherone@gmail.com - Jira Admin
  • athirdone@yahoo.com - Project Admin / User

That way you can see the impacts of permission settings, notifications, and so on. Use multiple browsers or incognito tabs to play as all three at once.

Don't just memorize things from the training or documentation; physically do them in your test site. You can also spend time creating fun fake projects and configuring them.

Exam Success Courses (Learning Paths)

You absolutely must do these even if you have a lot of work experience. They're free, well-designed, and broken up into bite-size chunks. They will help you in the following ways:

  • State the concepts very clearly and simply. There is not much fluff in these at all.
  • Give you specific tips on focus areas and ways exam questions are designed to trick you.
  • Prompt you to take actions on your test site as you go so you can etch the concepts into your brain.
  • Give you a structured way to study that matches the exam content.
  • Give you practice questions that are very similar to the real exam.

Special note to more experienced admins: Do not skip any of the coursework, even if you think you know it. Just being good at Jira or Org Admin is probably not going to be enough; you have to get into the mindset of the exam creators. Also lots of changes have happened to Cloud over time. If most of your experience is in Data Center/Server, it's going to map maybe 75% but you need to know how Cloud differs.

Tough Areas and Tricky Questions

For the Jira Admin exam, I found these areas tough:

  • Company- versus team-managed projects - My company had team-managed projects turned off, so I knew less about them. Also, they generally streamline things that are more complex or require Jira admins in company projects. You've got to know the differences. Create pairs of projects like this: "Company Scrum Test" CST and "Team Scrum Test" TST. Any time you are studying a subject, bring up the project settings of both side-by-side and compare. Click through each process on both and note differences (notifications, workflows, screens, etc.).
  • Permission levels - lots of questions involve knowing what an Org Admin, Jira Admin, and Project Admin can do. Physically test this using multiple accounts with different permission levels. You also need to know exactly what each permission in a permission scheme does, and which permissions are configured globally.
  • Workflows - Make sure you understand the terminology and the difference between triggers, conditions, and validators. Also be sure you know that only Jira admins can edit company-managed project/shared workflows, and that team projects have fewer options.
  • Screens/fields - Know the hierarchy of Issue Type Screen Scheme/Screen Scheme/Screen, and the relations to Field Configuration and project-level layouts. This is legitimately confusing! Try drawing a diagram on paper of how those things work together.
  • (Org Admin Course) Products - Somehow I never noticed that for Jira, TWO products are created: Jira and Jira Administration. There may be tough questions around this.

Last, let's talk about tricky questions. On both exams, there are "trick" questions. Luckily the prep courses tell you this directly, so when taking the exam, think carefully and watch out for words like "definitely".

For example, you might be asked a question around permissions and licensing where there's a group called jira-software-users. DO NOT ASSUME that this is being used as in a stock implementation. It's totally possible that a Jira admin is using "salespeople" as a default group instead. Just pay attention to tips about this sort of thing during the training.

Good luck! Try to do the exam within a week of finishing the coursework so things are fresh in your mind.

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Hans Polder
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September 13, 2024

Nice post, @John Price ! Definitely resounds some of my experiences when going for the ACP120 and ACP520 certifications 😊.

Some additional tips from my side:

  • As the ACP120-prep course will tell you: For the best experience you'll likely need the Premium (or at least Standard) package to get the full range of relevant configuration options. You can get this for free for about a month, so that should give ample time to prepare.
  • I would definitely start with ACP620, not ACP120. The ACP620 course is somewhat easier and more straightforward (I managed it with 100% on the exam). It very tightly goes into detail about boards, projects, and all the entities that exist in those. I had been using Jira for quite some time, but still learned A LOT from this course.

    Also, preparing and doing the exam for ACP620 will help you become more prepared for doing a similar one for ACP120/ACP520. I definitely was quite nervous for the ACP620 exam - much less so for the ACP120 exam that followed!
  • What really helped me get the 100% on the ACP620 exam was doing one of the practice exams listed on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?src=ukw&q=ACP-620. I went over all the practice exams twice - which took some time - but made me very well prepared. (Don't worry though: These practice exams are quite tough - the actual exam was less complex in my experience).

    I would still recommend doing one of those practice exams since each answer is explained thoroughly and helped me learn/understand some of the caveats much better.

 

Best of luck with your preparations!

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John Price
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September 14, 2024

Nice - I didn't know about the practice exams. 

Hans Polder
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September 15, 2024

Yup, they are available for (at least) the ACP120 and ACP620 exams, when I was looking for them a few months ago.

Suraj Gurav September 16, 2024

Interesting and really insightful post.
Do you know if we can have a sandbox or similar version of Jira for learning?
Our company uses Jira Datacenter and as a end user, I've not much permissions. So, I'm looking for a Jira playground where I can practice and study for the exams.

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John Price
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September 16, 2024

Hi @Suraj Gurav - 

For Data Center you can get a 30-day trial, but you'd need to install it somewhere. See:

If you have a decent laptop you should be ok with a local install, assuming your company allows it. 

It's a different exam (ACP-100), of course. Depending on your goal, you could just do the Cloud (ACP-120) to prepare yourself for the future :-)

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