Atlassian Solution Services Associate, Dan Schillace, shares the benefits that Atlassian training provides, including the 6 overall Certifications available to earn and share.
Roberto Musso: Thank you for joining us for our next installment of the Atlassian Advantage Podcast series. Here's our next episode, Atlassian Training.
Sean O'Sullivan: Hello, everyone and thanks for joining us again today for our latest podcast on Atlassian Training benefits and certifications. My name is Sean O'Sullivan, the sales director of the Atlassian team at Carahsoft, and I'm joined today by Atlassian services solutions advocate, Dan Schillace. Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.
Dan Schillace: Sean, it's a pleasure to be here to represent Atlassian. Happy to have this discussion with you, guys.
Sean O'Sullivan: Great. Yeah. Happy to have you here. Dan, the team at Carahsoft often receives questions from our government customers with regards to resources and what we have available for Atlassian training. A couple of questions for you today and I'll start with the first one here, what do you think is the most important aspect of creating a really good comprehensive training program?
Dan Schillace: Yeah, that's a great start and a great first question. When done properly, we feel pretty confident that training can make workers more efficient. It helps with increase of production, revenue, and profits all while decreasing costs, waste, and inefficiencies. Effective training can lead to increase compliance with regulations, and then it can also lead to a happier, more satisfied engaged workforce, which in turn, of course, reduces turnover and costly new employee onboarding. The benefits are many, but creating effective training isn't always easy.
Dan Schillace: Some common problems include creating training that doesn't support a true business goal, or that's intended to solve a problem that training can't fix, or without first identifying the true purpose of the training, or one that includes too much information, or maybe all those things. We always recommend doing a training needs assessment first and then developing the learning objectives. This way you can create a team-based approach to your team training. It's also important to create a mix of training.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. Okay. You say creating effective training isn't easy, so then how do you ensure that your team is learning in the most effective way?
Dan Schillace: An effective mix is one of instruction plus hands-on activities so the students can have real world experience when applying what they learned. Self-paced courses are good for refreshers and getting a new hire up to speed while the in-person trainings are better for larger topics or implementations that are being introduced for the first time. One thing to keep in mind is that a learning management system, or what's known as an LMS, can actually play a big role in helping you keep employees up to date.
Sean O'Sullivan: Okay. LMS, learning management system, could you go into a bit more detail about that?
Dan Schillace: Yeah, sure. An LMS is basically just a software application that's used to assign, deliver, track, and report on training. If you use an LMS at work, it's easy for your employees to log in, see the list of trainings that they've been assigned, and of course, to let them know where they left off.
Sean O'Sullivan: Okay. Got it. We need to have effective training and an LMS obviously is important in delivering that. Let's talk specifically then about Atlassian. How does Atlassian deliver their training?
Dan Schillace: Yeah, great question. We have a few ways. The first way is what we call on demand, which is recorded. The other way we do it is with live instruction, and we do that either virtually or onsite. Clearly right now, onsite is on hold due to the current situation. I know that we're all hoping that we'll open up soon again here in the near future. We also have an in product app for basic JIRA training that allows our end users to get up to speed quickly with our tools. Finally, we do offer the individual purchase of our on demand recorded training for perpetual use for companies that are either behind our firewall or need to scale training to a large organization. It's a healthy mix of a lot of different types of training.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. Okay. So then who are the trainings geared towards specifically?
Dan Schillace: If you go to our catalog at atlassian.training.com, most of the courses in there, except for what you will see are both the JIRA and Confluence essential courses, most of the other courses in there are geared towards what we would refer to as our admins and power users of our tools. The essential courses are good introductory for everyday end users. And then of course, there's a link in there to the training app, which is available in the Atlassian Marketplace, which is our version of like the Apple App Store. And as I mentioned earlier, that is a great way to train end users.
Sean O'Sullivan: Yeah. That training for JIRA app I think is a really creative one that Atlassian provides considering that's going to built-in and works in tandem with the software. Question though with regards to certifications, right, and becoming experts on the software. Plenty of vendors provide certification. Why would you say to get certified specifically with Atlassian software?
Dan Schillace: Yeah, that's another great question. As the Atlassian tool set becomes more ubiquitous in the marketplace, the skillset for those tools are becoming more and more in demand. Becoming an Atlassian Certified Professional earns you recognition for your skills and experience with the Atlassian tools. It can help you propel your career like joining what we would call an elite group of worldwide professionals that is formally endorsed by us, Atlassian. Just to list a few of the benefits that you'll get from becoming an ACP or Atlassian Certified Professional.
They include differentiating yourself and standing out as a top performer, helping optimize tools, products for your teams so they can do their best work, being an invaluable representative Atlassian at your company and enhancing your credibility with your managers and colleagues, open the door to more career opportunities and advancement in your own career path, and finally, just learn to do more with the Atlassian products you love.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. All right. We at Carahsoft, right, we're working with government agencies that are pretty large, right? We're selling to these large enterprise guys with the data center solutions and whatnot. For these types of customers, right, what's the most effective way for agencies to purchase maybe bulk training for large teams, maybe if they don't even know right away, right, what they want to actually study and maybe have some kind of flexibility to decide over a few months or so?
Dan Schillace: Yeah. The answer to that question is training credits. Training credits is like buying a gift card of sorts. You make a purchase in the amount appropriate for your team, which then creates a training credit account. Then your team can plan accordingly and redeem the training they want when they want to use it. They can then draw down on that account from the initial amount purchased, and it's good for 12 months from the date of purchase. This is a fantastic way for customers to spend leftover budget before the end of their fiscal year, and this is a really great place where Atlassian will offer a 20% discount on 20,000 credits or higher. In essence, a company or agency can purchase 20,000 credits for only $16,000.
Sean O'Sullivan: That's an incentivization right there, isn't it?
Dan Schillace: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Sean O'Sullivan: Dan, you've been doing this for a while, right, with the training? What would you say that your customers these days need help with when it comes to training?
Dan Schillace: I would say undoubtedly is mostly how to properly use our tools and get the most out of them. Companies and agencies, they're investing in technology, but they often overlook the investment in the training of these tools for their employees. And Atlassian provides training of our tools directly from the source, us, Atlassian.
Sean O'Sullivan: Okay. So then if I'm working in a government agency, what's the competitive advantage you would say of having Atlassian training as opposed to me just going to a guy down the hallway who might know what he's talking about and just have him teach me the ropes?
Dan Schillace: Yeah. There's certainly a way to get trained that way, and there are definitely a lot of other resources probably online with things like YouTube and resources like that. But given that we are Atlassian, our training is coming to you right from the source. We are best poised to provide training for our tools as our team has direct access to Atlassian product engineering teams. Also, we have the ability to provide the most timely updates to our courses as our products are updated quite frequently. And finally, we have content tailored to both the hosted cloud and the on-premise server and data center deployments.
Sean O'Sullivan: Alrighty. I guess I should wrap it up then, Dan. I'll let you vent a little, right? Doing all this training, what do you wish that people knew? What do you wish they understood when it came to just Atlassian solutions in general?
Dan Schillace: I think I like to answer that question this way. Atlassian tools are extremely powerful and are revolutionizing the way that teams collaborate and do work. We are truly living by our mission to help our customers unleash the potential of every team. We want our customers to see the importance of investing in the training of their workforce equal to the importance of the investment in our technology. We know Atlassian University is a great way to help customers achieve that end.
Sean O'Sullivan: Yeah, Dan, and I can say personally that we at Carahsoft actually used Atlassian University ourselves, and I can certainly vouch that it contains some great material there. Well, hey, Dan, I really appreciate your time today. Hey, where would you suggest that some of our listeners go to learn more about Atlassian's training and certifications?
Dan Schillace: Yes, a final great question. Our main catalog page lives at training.atlassian.com and there you can link directly to the app page as well for the app that we talked about earlier. You can also get a link directly there to our certification homepage, which actually lives at atlassian.com/university/certification.
Sean O'Sullivan: Great suggestions, Dan. Hey, thanks so much again, Dan, for your time and valuable insights and this information, right? Training is incredibly important for our public sector customers to ensure that they are using their software optimally, and I can't stress it enough. For our listeners, please check out Dan's suggestions and the resources on Carahsoft's Atlassian Advantage site and feel free to contact us anytime, atlassian@carahsoft.com, or you can always give us a shout 833-547-2468. Thanks again, Dan, for your time. And I hope everybody stays safe, and we'll see you again soon.
Dan Schillace: As always, thank you, Sean.