Paid Partnership with Work Wranglers
I also teach Atlassian’s instructor-led courses through Work Wranglers, so read this as a conversation with someone I work with, not an outside review. The answers below are edited for length and clarity.
As I like to tell people, my start with Atlassian was taking over for an admin who had already left. I had no one to learn from: just the online docs, the occasional Support ticket with Atlassian (when things went really off the rails), and room to click on all the buttons to figure out what they actually did. The exact words were, “Good luck, you get tickets tomorrow.” I didn’t get any official training until a later job, where I was a full-time admin and still working most of it out on the fly. It also incidentally coincided with my first Summit conference.
Heather Ronnebeck’s start, as she told it to me, was nearly the same: a first environment, the instruction “don’t break it,” and no training behind it. Her description of what came next fits mine too. You learn the lessons the hard way, and then you relearn the correct way to do things.
That second round of learning is the case for formal training. Documentation tells you what a feature does. It rarely tells you that the feature is a bad idea for your situation, or that the template you just picked was never meant to be finished without an admin.
Heather is the CEO and Founder of Work Wranglers, a Canadian Atlassian Solution Partner and Authorized Training Partner. By the count I had going in, there are 11 Authorized Training Partners worldwide and Work Wranglers is the only one in Canada. I sat down with her for an hour to ask what that designation involves, what’s different about training Canadian organizations, and what Atlassian education still gets wrong. We used Whose Line rules: the questions were made up and the points didn’t matter.
This is a different format for the blog, and I haven’t done many like it. I wanted you to hear from someone whose view of Atlassian education isn’t mine, in close to her own words. If you like it, tell me in the comments or on LinkedIn, and I’ll make interviews a more regular part of the mix.
What an Authorized Training Partner Has to Commit To
Rodney: What does being an Atlassian Authorized Training Partner require, and what does it get a customer that self-study or a non-authorized trainer doesn’t?
Heather: It’s a designation that’s traditionally reserved for Solution Partners, as an additional role on top of the licensing, reselling, and consulting work. It gives us the ability to teach with Atlassian’s own training materials, copies of their environments, and their lab equipment. The training is recognized by Atlassian, so students get digital badges they can track. It also helps with continuing education: an official course earns more PDUs or continuing education units toward a renewal than self-study would. And we’ve been vetted by Atlassian.
Rodney: I think that’s the core of it. I’ve given plenty of training as The Jira Life Rodney over the years. It’s one thing to say “this is the best practice” because you’ve been there and passed the tests. It’s another to say “this is how it works” because you’ve confirmed it with Atlassian. There’s a polish there that a non-authorized trainer doesn’t necessarily have.
Heather: Up until a few years ago it wasn’t a heavily used program. Atlassian had just introduced individual instructors, and at the time there was a very strong difference between individual instructors and training partners.
Rodney: Which leads to my next question. There are 11 Authorized Training Partners worldwide and one in Canada. Why so few? Is it hard to get into, hard to stay in, or just not a business many people want?
Heather: A bit of all three. You need at least one or two people who are consistently available and willing to go through Atlassian’s onboarding and evaluation. You sign a legal agreement committing to buy labs from Atlassian 12 times a year and to teach a minimum of 12 classes in a calendar year. If you don’t make 12, you lose the designation.
That’s the legal and approval side. On the business side, training isn’t a large revenue stream for most Solution Partners. They’re more interested in services, implementations, and licenses, so you have to want to do it, and want people using the tools properly. There’s a lot of work in it: building the material, studying, confirming things.
The evaluation itself is demanding. Atlassian drills you on whether you can communicate, whether you can teach, whether you can demo an environment, whether you can read their lab instructions and explain the gotchas to a student. And a lot of why I care about it goes back to my own start. When I began in Atlassian I didn’t know what it was. There was no self-paced learning to speak of and no certified training available to me, so I picked up a lot of bad habits. Even the self-learning materials don’t always tell you “don’t do this, it’s not going to work.” There’s always a gap between what any training material says, whether that’s PMI or CCNA or Atlassian, and what people do out in the world.
Rodney: Out of everything I’ve done as an Atlassian persona, teaching is probably the most rewarding. The people in the room aren’t going to struggle with the questions I struggled with. I was making it up as I went. They’re getting the guidance from day one.
Heather: That’s the difference. We’ve already had to learn those lessons and then relearn the correct way. So when you learn from us, you start ahead of where we started.
Training Canadian Organizations Comes With Its Own Checklist
Rodney: Given my background, I’m always interested in how different people see the world. What’s different about training Canadian organizations versus a US or European one? Language requirements, assumptions, public sector rules?
Heather: There’s always the potential for bilingual delivery in French and English, and sometimes a third language. And there are product details you have to know on the fly. The French translations in the Atlassian suite are written for France. They aren’t designed for Canadian French or Québécois. On the English side, you have to set the language to UK English to get something close to Canadian English, and out of the box some of Jira’s statuses lean toward one version of English or the other depending on configuration.
That means explaining that a lot of the default templates and processes need customization, because Canadian users don’t always work with the same assumptions as US users. Then there’s scheduling: more statutory and bank holidays to plan around, plus time zone changes to track.
Affordability matters too. Being able to invoice in Canadian dollars instead of US dollars is sometimes enough on its own. And as a Canadian partner, our clients can be eligible for Canadian government funding programs. A few years ago one organization needed training and ended up getting it paid for through a grant, because we’re located in Canada.
Rodney: I’ll say this as an American: the US hasn’t been the best neighbor to Canada lately. Having a quality Canadian option for this kind of training matters right now, because the company you’ve always relied on in the US or Europe may not be the one you can rely on next year.
Heather: It also shows up in data. When we record our virtual sessions, those recordings are saved in the cloud, in Canada. We don’t use US data centers unless the customer is in the US. The course material is Atlassian’s, but we’re careful about where the data goes.
How Work Wranglers Got Into the Training Business
Rodney: This one I don’t know the answer to. What’s the origin story? What gap did you see that made you go, “there’s something here”?
Heather: It started organically. We were solving a project management and tooling problem on the Atlassian stack, and while doing that, people started asking whether I could coach them or show them a thing or two in Jira or Confluence. I realized not many people were doing that, and it was around the time Atlassian started its individual instructor program, so I got on board as an individual instructor.
We weren’t a Solution Partner at the time, so the training partner program wasn’t open to us. Going the individual route is where I found a lot of the gaps in that program. The requirements for individual instructors were lower but more restrictive. An Authorized Training Partner can teach anything in Atlassian’s course catalog. An individual instructor can only teach the courses they hold the matching certification for. If your only certification is Jira administration, you can’t teach Org Admin, Confluence Admin, or Jira Service Management Admin.
From there it grew. The demand for different courses kept growing until it made sense to move from individual instructor to training partner, and that transition happened shortly after we became an official Solution Partner. We didn’t set out to spot a gap. We got handed the problems, one after another, and kept saying yes.
Students Think Jira Is Easy to Set Up
Rodney: On to Atlassian education today, and we’ll see what we can answer without expletives. What’s the most common thing students think they know about Jira before a class that turns out to be dead wrong?
Heather: How easy it is to set up.
Rodney: 100%. It’s sold as ready to go, with templates that fit your need. That was never what the templates were for. They were meant to get you most of the way there so an admin could finish it off.
Heather: And it’s not only Jira. Monday and ClickUp sell it the same way: just pick a template and go. But nothing is what you need. There is no such thing as out of the box. I’m setting up another system for internal use right now, and every time the docs say “use this feature,” I go to use it and it’s not what I wanted, or even what I thought it was.
Rodney: That gets into my answer. People see every feature Jira and Confluence have and assume they have to figure out how to use all of them. Just because it exists doesn’t mean you need it. It’s fine to put something in the description instead of creating another field. It’s fine to skip the development tools if you have no reason to use them, or versions and components if your space doesn’t need them.
Heather: Same with Rovo. It’s sitting there, and you don’t have to use it. The thing I cover most with administrators is to focus on what the business and the team need. Don’t go in clicking around like a madman. Sit down and work out what you need first. Ninety percent of administration is working with the people and the processes before you touch Jira.
Rodney: And that’s the step most people never get to. A request comes in, it becomes a to-do item, and it gets done without any thought about how it changes the way people use the product day to day.
Heather: Or whether the field makes sense, or whether there’s already a field with the same name. Admins are always dealing with configuration sprawl, and a lot of it is because we forget to check what’s already in the environment before we build something new.
Rodney: I had a request recently for a new field that would hold a summary of everything that had happened on the work item so far. My first question was what was wrong with the summary and description. The answer was that those were getting too full, and they needed one quick place to see where things stood. So, what’s wrong with a Confluence page? It turned out they had assumed that wasn’t how Jira and Confluence were supposed to work together. Every thought was going into the description instead of a comment or a page, so of course it was polluted by the end of the workflow. Most of that detail belonged in Confluence, where it could be cross-referenced with other work. Being an admin is mostly getting to the heart of requests like that one.
Heather: I had a version of that where people wanted “a tweet of the ticket”: where it’s at and what’s next. They didn’t need a Confluence page for every item. They were building a dashboard and wanted a 30-second summary of next steps. The best answer I had was a short text field we called a sitrep, a situation report.
End Users Are the Most Underserved Audience
Rodney: Admins, end users, leadership at various levels: which group is most underserved by training right now?
Heather: End users. Atlassian has a lot of courses for administrators, whether that’s space admins, the whole environment, or org admins. End users get “What is Jira?” or “What is Rovo?” or “What is Confluence?” They don’t get the role-based foundation.
Say I’m a project manager, and I’m picking on project managers and scrum masters because they’re the most common. How do I set up my sprint board or my Kanban board? How do I break down epics in a way that makes sense? How do I use Jira to get value as a PM, knowing that what I learn in a class may not match my actual environment? And how do I talk to my administrator without jumping straight to a solution? Do I bring business requirements, or what management wants?
What I hear is, “I can’t pull my stuff the way I want because it isn’t in this status or this column.” Well, that’s because it isn’t configured that way, and there’s governance behind it. That governance piece isn’t being explained to users. Your organization has policies. You can’t just spin up team-managed spaces, and dear God, those things are a nightmare. I could rant about team-managed spaces all day. Then multiply that by role: how do you configure Jira for a designer, a project manager, engineers, QA, finance? Every one of those has its own needs.
Rodney: Jira happens to end users a lot of the time. The decision to use it gets made somewhere up high and pushed down, and then they have to work it out. It isn’t easy, because every organization’s Jira is individualized. Even if they used Jira at their last job, that experience could be worthless for how it’s used here, let alone if they learned on Data Center and now they’re on Cloud. If I could add one class, it would be how to teach admins to teach their users.
Heather: That would be huge. The admins know their environment best, they can explain it best, and when things change they’re the ones making the change. Every admin has their own way of teaching, so giving them some best practices and a toolbox would help a lot. And I’m not talking about change management in the JSM sense. Organizational change management is the biggest hurdle with any work management tool, because it means getting people to change how they work, and nobody likes that.
What a Certification Is Worth, and to Whom
Rodney: Let’s talk certifications. What are they worth to someone hiring a Jira person, what are they worth to the person earning them, and is that the same value?
Heather: It depends on your career path. If you want to work at a Marketplace Partner, a Solution Partner, or Atlassian itself, the certifications matter to you and to the hiring managers there. I can’t think of a Solution Partner that wouldn’t want certified people in client environments. It’s a way of showing you understand enough of the system to pass.
In government, some Canadian organizations require certifications or an equivalent number of years of experience. I can’t say as much for the US; it’s touch and go and depends on the organization. Some of the larger corporations put weight on it. And half the time, the people writing job descriptions don’t know what they’re putting in them. I’ve seen postings asking for ten years of experience with AI tools that haven’t existed for ten years.
If you want a career in this, go for it. It may help you get ahead, but it’s also good for you to know whether you understand the material. And if you’re planning on harder technical exams, like Cisco’s CCNA or CCNP, Microsoft’s certifications, or the PMP, the Atlassian exams give you exposure to the testing environment and how exams are written. Having sat on some of Atlassian’s exam-writing boards, I can tell you they aren’t written to be deviously tricky. They’re written to make you think. And if your employer is paying, it’s always great to take a free exam.
Rodney: From the hiring side, I don’t think most of them know what they’re asking for, and it’s a checkbox. From the candidate side, the first thing I’d say is don’t be me. I took my first one because I saw a mountain in front of me and went to climb it. I was three years into being a Jira admin, I wasn’t ready, and I got lucky. The first time I took the Confluence exam, I failed it.
But here’s what I’ve found the value to be. Studying for these exams has made me exercise parts of the tools I don’t use every day. Some aren’t used because they’re less valuable than the rest of the feature set, some only matter for rare use cases, and some just aren’t part of how your current company works. That doesn’t mean they won’t matter at your next company. You’ll learn more about the tool studying for an exam than any other way, outside of having your hand held in a training course.
Heather: It also depends on when in your career you take them. I didn’t start writing certification exams until I was almost ten years in. By then I’d stubbed my toe a few dozen times. If you’re newer, they’re great for surfacing things you wouldn’t have known to look for.
Teaching a Product That Changes Mid-Class
Rodney: Atlassian keeps reshuffling products, names, bundles, and collections. How does a training company keep a curriculum current when things can change in the middle of a class?
Heather: Most of the time we get advance notice of major changes. When something rolls out mid-class, we roll with it. There have been several times we found a change partway through because a field or menu wasn’t where we expected. We turn it into a positive: the lab environment is getting an update, it’s been rolling out for a few days or it’s just starting, and students should expect to see it in their own environment soon if they don’t already. It’s also a chance to talk about release tracks, where some plans let you hold changes back or push them in bulk. When it happens to me, I make a joke of it. At least they’re making updates. At least you know you’re learning the newest thing, because it’s new to me too.
Rodney: I keep it positive as well, but I’m honest that this is part of the job. Things change constantly, and sometimes you learn on the job even after many years of doing this. As long as Atlassian works this way, there will always be a need for someone to run Jira and Confluence. It isn’t like on-prem, where you decided when updates went out. I dropped into someone’s Data Center instance a couple of months ago and was surprised how foreign it felt after years of almost exclusively Cloud, even though I know objectively it hasn’t changed much.
Heather: If Atlassian is pushing team-managed spaces harder in Jira and Product Discovery, it needs to produce materials that help users run them. Product Discovery classes would be great, by the way. I advise students not to touch team-managed spaces if they want any sense of control or governance. But a class on managing team-managed spaces would be valuable, because Atlassian wants people setting up their own spaces without an admin.
Rodney: I’ll probably be the only one to say this, and Alex fights me on it every time, but team-managed spaces do have one limited purpose: the first five users in a brand-new organization.
Heather: I’ll give you that. I’d add a short-lived effort with fewer than five people, regardless of organization size. “We’re planning the holiday party this year.” Small scale, limited lifespan. Once you get to ten people, you need governance.
Community Picks Up Where the Classroom Stops
Rodney: I straddle all the worlds of Atlassian: I’m a customer, a content creator, a Champion, and a partner, so I see every side of an argument at once. What role does the wider community play next to formal training? I mean ACEs, Champions, the Community forums, all of it.
Heather: It’s a continuation and a resource. A lot of what I’ve learned over the years came from the Community forums and the support documentation, and from being able to ask pointed questions when I’m stuck troubleshooting. There are AI agents and tools for that now, but the value of community is that if you’re thinking of doing something, someone has probably already done it. You just have to ask.
And it’s welcoming. I don’t think I’ve ever posted a question in Community and gotten backlash the way a subreddit would give you. It’s beginner-friendly for people who are learning and trying to advance their careers. There are people who use the forums to sell, but Atlassian monitors for that. At the end of my classes, I point students to Community and to their local ACE events.
Rodney: Each of those venues gives a different view. As an official Atlassian trainer, I’m giving people the official view from Atlassian. As a content creator, I’m giving a more nuanced, less polished version: this is what it’s like to be a real Jira admin. On the Community forums, I’m giving the niche view, for a situation unique to you and maybe five other people in the world. They don’t fight each other. They add up to the overall picture.
When I started blogging, I was terrified for the first couple of months that the trolls were coming any moment. I have almost never had a negative experience in the Atlassian ecosystem. Even when people disagree, they disagree gracefully. We’re not going to talk about the subreddits.
Heather: Different ballgame entirely. Don’t go to the dark side over in the corner.
Rodney: They have cookies.
Heather: They’re oatmeal raisin.
Rodney: Never mind, then. That explains everything.
Class Dismissed
I walked into my first Jira instance with “Good luck, you get tickets tomorrow.” Heather walked into hers with “Don’t break it.” Neither of us had anyone to ask, and we both spent years unlearning the bad habits we’d taught ourselves because we just didn’t know what we didn’t know. Somewhere out in the world (and let’s be honest, likely in your organization), someone is getting that same handoff this week.
So here’s what I want you to do. Pick one team that uses your instance, and ask two of its members how they learned Jira. If the answer is “someone showed me” or “I figured it out,” write down the three things you most wish they knew about how your instance is set up, and why. That list is the first draft of the end-user class Heather and I both wish existed, and as she pointed out, you’re the person best placed to teach it.
How did your own start go? Were you handed an instance and told not to break it, or did someone train you first? Or maybe you learned by following along with a blog or video? I want to hear your stories!
Until then, this is Rodney, asking: have you updated your Jira issues work items today?
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