Atlassian Careers, pt2: What skills are needed to become a Jira Administrator?

Jira Admin Skillset

Jira admins need to have a T-shaped skillset in order to succeed. The vertical is the ability to administer and govern the Atlassian tools. The horizontal is the ability to solve business problems using the first the two skills.

Tool Administration

At a minimum, you need to know how to configure Jira. This also includes other Atlassian products like Jira Service Management and Confluence. This includes system settings, projects settings, user settings, plugins, etc. You also need to understand back-end concepts, 3rd party integrations, migrations, and much more. We’ll call this Tool Administration.

Tool Governance

After that, you have to configure Jira in a manner consistent with business requirements. Some areas of concern here include data retention, access control policies, and setting project- or issue-level security. You need to make your Jira setup can scale up. Depending on the industry of your business, you may need to understand the impact of different privacy regulations on your instance (for example, HIIPA or GDPR.) Collectively, we’ll refer to this as Tool Governance.

Business Enablement

Lastly, we have Business Enablement. This is where you actually use Jira to improve the operational efficiency of your customer. This can take many forms:

Helping a development team migrate from another tool and configure their Agile dev process in Jira
Assisting an IT service team with setting up a Jira Service Management project in support of their ITIL process and teaching them to self-manage their service catalogue and knowledge base
Connecting Jira projects to Scaled Agile tools to enable Portfolio management

No two Jira admins are alike, but they all share certain characteristics:

They mastered Jira and other Atlassian products
Their ability to provide value to the business extends beyond just Jira
They love helping people and teams