I did not think certifications were worth much. Then one of them showed me what I had been missing

Key takeaways

• Certifications mostly measure whether you can pass a certification. That has not changed my mind.
• The exception is when a certification's syllabus is broader than the path you taught yourself. That is not the certificate being valuable — it is the SYLLABUS being valuable.
• Self-taught means you went deep on whatever paid off first. You end up advanced in one branch and missing things a beginner would have been handed on day one.
• Free ACP-120 mock exams land on leanzero.net on Monday. Original questions, every answer cited to Atlassian's own documentation, Cloud only, no signup.

I have never been a certifications person. My view, held for years and not quietly, was that a certification measures one thing reliably: whether you can pass that certification. It tells you someone sat down, worked through a syllabus, and answered enough multiple-choice questions correctly on a Tuesday. It does not tell you they can run a migration that touches forty thousand issues, or debug a workflow that silently stopped firing, or say no to a bad request from a stakeholder.

I have worked with brilliant people who have no certifications at all. I have also seen certified consultants make decisions I would not let near a production instance. So my position was simple. Do the work, show the work, skip the badge.

Then in the space of a few days I went and got two of them.

Claude Certified Architect – Foundations — Anthropic's architect credential, covering Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, the Claude API and MCP. Badge is public, verify it yourself.

ACP-120 — Jira Administration for Cloud — Atlassian's administrator certification, issued 3 September 2026. Also public.

ACP-120 is the one nearly every Jira administrator ends up being asked for. It is on job specs, it is what partners count when they are scoring a delivery team, and if you administer Jira Cloud professionally it is the badge people expect to see next to your name. That is precisely why the market around it is so bad, and I will come back to that.

One of the two did something I did not expect.

The one that changed my mind, and it was not the Atlassian one

ACP-120 went roughly how I thought it would. I administer Jira Cloud for a living, and I build products on top of it. Sitting the exam was mostly a matter of mapping what I already do onto Atlassian's preferred vocabulary for it, plus a handful of corners I do not touch often enough to have memorised. Useful, fine, no revelation. If you already do the job, it certifies that you do the job.

The Claude one was different, and the difference is worth explaining properly because it is not "the exam was hard".

The credential covers designing and building production applications with Claude — Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, the Claude API, and MCP. I have been building agentic workflows for a long time now. I run a newsroom loop that researches, red-teams and publishes on this site. I run agents that do real delivery work day to day, not demos. I have a local model swarm on a Mac Studio. I have built and shipped Forge apps that call models in anger, and three of them are live on the Atlassian Marketplace. By any reasonable measure I was not a beginner walking into that syllabus.

And I still came out of it with a list of things I did not know existed.

Not advanced things. That is the part that stung. They were foundational things — patterns for structuring an agent's context, ways of composing tools, configuration surfaces I had been working around for months without realising there was a supported way to do the thing I was hand-rolling. I had built elaborate machinery on top of a layer I had never actually read the manual for.

This is what self-taught actually costs you

Here is the honest shape of it, and I suspect a lot of people reading this will recognise themselves.

When you teach yourself, you do not learn a subject. You learn a path through a subject. Something breaks, you fix it. Something looks useful, you go deep on it. You follow the parts that pay off immediately, because those are the parts you can feel working, and you build competence in a long narrow line rather than across a surface.

It is a skill tree where you have dumped every point into one branch. You are three tiers deep in something most people have not touched, and you are missing a node near the trunk that gets handed to everyone on day one of a structured course. Nobody tells you it is missing. That is the whole problem. You cannot search for a thing you do not know has a name, and the workaround you invented works well enough that nothing ever forces you to look.

A syllabus is just somebody else's map of the whole surface. It walks you across the parts you would never have chosen to walk across, because they were not on fire and they were not interesting. Most of that walk is stuff you already know, which is why certifications feel like a waste of time. And then occasionally it puts you in front of something near the trunk that you somehow never picked up, and you realise you have been paying a tax on that gap for a year.

So I want to be precise about what I now think, because it would be easy to read this as a conversion. It is not.

I still do not think the certificate is worth much. Nobody should hire me because of a badge, and I would not hire anyone on that basis either. What was worth something was the syllabus — being made to walk a surface I had been cherry-picking. The badge is a receipt for that walk. The walk is the thing.

That distinction matters because it tells you which certifications are worth your time. Not the prestigious ones. The ones whose syllabus is genuinely wider than the path you cut for yourself. If you already do the job end to end, you are buying a receipt. If the syllabus covers ground you have been routing around, you are buying a map.

What I am building next: free ACP-120 mock exams

Which brings me to the part that is actually useful to you rather than about me.

Preparing for ACP-120, the practice material available is not good. It is mostly exam dumps — scraped question banks of uncertain provenance, where the stated answer is sometimes simply wrong and nothing tells you which ones. Plenty of it is old enough to be testing Server and Data Center behaviour on an exam that is Cloud only. You cannot revise against that. You end up memorising someone else's mistakes and finding out on the day.

So I am publishing free ACP-120 mock exams on **leanzero.net***. They go live on Monday.*

No signup, no email wall, no trial that turns into a subscription on day eight. You open the page and you practise. I am not selling anything here — if you find them useful and you later need someone who does this work for a living, you will know where to find me. That is the entire business model of the thing.

Three things about how they are built, because they are the whole point.

The questions are original. They are not harvested from anyone's dump and they are not reproductions of real exam content — that would breach Atlassian's exam agreement, and it would also be useless to you, because a memorised answer to a question you will not be asked is worth nothing. They are written fresh, in the shape the exam actually uses.

And every answer is checked against Atlassian's own documentation, with the citation attached. Not "the correct answer is C" but the correct answer is C, here is the passage that says so, and here is why each of the other three is wrong. The wrong answers are where the learning is. Any practice tool that just tells you the letter is training you to recognise questions rather than understand the product.

And it is Cloud only, deliberately. ACP-120 is a Cloud exam. The Server and Data Center answers drifting around in the older banks are not merely useless for it, they are actively harmful, because they are plausible — they describe a real Jira, just not the one you are being examined on. That is the worst kind of wrong answer to revise against, and it is everywhere.

If you are sitting this exam, that is the gap I am trying to close. Somewhere to practise that is current, Cloud-only, cited, and free.

And I want to be more present in the Atlassian Community

One more thing, and it is related.

I have spent a lot of time in the Atlassian developer community — Forge, the APIs, the places where the conversation is about building things. That is my natural habitat and it is where I have contributed most.

The Atlassian Community proper, where administrators actually live, I have engaged with far less. That is a gap I want to close, and honestly it is partly embarrassment at how long it took me to notice — the same blind spot this whole article is about. Gabriela has been doing a genuinely excellent job of showing up there consistently, answering things properly, and it has made me want to pull my weight in that space rather than only in the developer corner where I am comfortable.

So that is the plan. Show up more, answer more, and put the mock exams out where the people revising for this thing can actually find them.

The certifications did not make me better at my job. Sitting one of the syllabuses did, and I would not have found that gap on my own, because the entire nature of the gap was that I did not know it was there. That is the argument for certifications I would not have made a month ago, and it is a narrower argument than the one people usually make for them.

Mock exams Monday, on leanzero.net, free. If you are sitting ACP-120 and you want something to revise against that is not an eight-year-old dump of somebody else's wrong answers, they will be there.

And if you are in the Atlassian Community and you see me turning up in threads I have no business being in yet — that is the other half of this. Say hello.