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:
- Hands-on admin experience with Jira Cloud.
- 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.
