How to Become a HubSpot Admin: Jorge Fuentes on Degrees, 51 Certifications and Owning Problems You Didn't Create

Jorge Fuentes has a test for anyone who wants to run a HubSpot portal. “If if if uh you’re not willing to maybe take a little bit of the blame even if something’s not your fault, right? You’re not ready to be an admin.”

He has spent the last five years at marketing agencies, working in portals other people built. When he came on Becoming Admin, Cameron Conner and Lindsey Smith asked him how to become a HubSpot admin and whether you need a college degree to do it. He was a HubSpot specialist at Sidekick Strategies, George B. Thomas’s HubSpot partner agency. He is also a HubSpot certified trainer, has a lesson in HubSpot Academy in Spanish, and holds 51 HubSpot Academy certifications.

His first HubSpot project was a single form. In 2014 he opened a free account to put it on the website of his father’s inflatable games company. “Okay, this is pretty cool,” he remembers thinking.

How did Jorge Fuentes go from his dad’s website to HubSpot specialist?

Jorge has worked for about ten years since college. Roughly half of that was as an in-house marketer. Along the way he went to law school, did side gigs and got an insurance license. “I actually stumbled upon HubSpot um incidentally mostly,” he said.

In 2021, with the pandemic still on, he took a remote job with a US agency. He started on email series and forms. Then “I got introduced to workflows, too, and within like a year and a half or so, I was already kind of like, you know, mastering the platform.” A tool he had used for a form became “the ins and outs of everything I did like on a daily basis.”

His route is less unusual than it sounds. The hosts pointed out that plenty of people go from sales rep to RevOps and land in the admin role “more or less overnight.”

What separates a great HubSpot admin from a good one?

The hosts asked what had made him good at the job. Jorge set technical skills and certifications to one side and talked about attitude, starting with the blame test.

An admin gets a steady flow of requests, from clients at an agency or from the sales and marketing teams in-house, and has to decide what comes first. “Some things are my problem to solve even though I didn’t create that problem, but it is mine to solve,” he said. Later he added, “If you can live and breathe problems, that’s you’re going to be fine as an admin.”

Technical skill came second in his answer.

Most of what breaks in front of him was set up by someone else. If you inherit a portal, our guide to HubSpot workflow dependencies shows how to map the automation before you change it.

Do you need a college degree to become a HubSpot admin?

One of the hosts has no college degree and asked what Jorge would tell someone in that position. Jorge has an associate’s degree in business management. He would still not start there today. “The trade of actually going in and pursuing a college degree is probably not the the what I would recommend.”

What he would do instead costs little. Watch YouTube, “upskill with ChatGPT,” take a few HubSpot Academy certifications, then start doing the work. “All of the business terminology, they can probably learn in in, you know, less than a month or so.” He was careful not to knock school. “Studying is good, absolutely. But, then studying a lot without execution, uh you know, it kind of like makes the knowledge die a little bit.”

To learn ad platforms, he set up test accounts and “started like playing around with stuff.” For HubSpot he suggests freelance work on Upwork, or building something for “personal projects or or or family project.” You want a real problem in front of you, because solving one is “what actually becomes valuable and or makes you valuable in the marketplace.”

Employers have taken the degree line out of many job posts, but hiring has changed less. Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute studied 11,300 roles and found that fewer than 1 in 700 hires in 2023 benefited from dropped degree requirements, and that about 45% of the firms that dropped them changed “in name only” (HR Dive, 2024). So bring proof. Jorge’s kind of proof is portals you built and problems you fixed.

Are HubSpot Academy certifications worth it for a new admin?

The hosts called him one of the record holders and asked whether 51 certifications was a vanity metric. “I think that those two things can be true at the same time,” Jorge said. Some of it is “I just want to catch them all.” Some of it is need. He took the reporting certification “because I was having issues like pulling up reports for for some of my clients and just really wanted to master it.”

He likes best the certifications that make you do something. The ones with “a practical exercise, like a practicum and plus the exam” are where “you get kind of like more juice out of them.” For a new admin, he would start with the Marketing Hub software certification and the Sales Hub software certification, since most people arriving at the Academy have already worked near marketing or sales.

His preference matches what sales leaders told us about why reps skip their sales process. In The State of Sales Enablement 2026, only 12% named reps not knowing the process existed, and lack of training was rarely the reason (The State of Sales Enablement 2026). Knowing a process and running it are different skills, as our piece on the knowing-doing gap explains.

How has AI changed the HubSpot admin role?

Jorge said no redesign since 2014 mattered as much as AI. Updates used to come every month or two. Since Breeze, several land most days. HubSpot launched Breeze at INBOUND in September 2024 with more than 200 platform updates, including a Copilot, four Breeze Agents and 80 AI features across the product (HubSpot via Business Wire, 2024).

At that pace he doubts one person can know the whole platform. A company now needs someone strong in automation, someone for “the IT portion of it,” meaning security and data backups, and people who know particular hubs well. “The traditional admin is kind of like I wouldn’t say dying, but it definitely is transitioning.”

RevOps is the other change. When Jorge started, his attitude was “I know how to use HubSpot, but I’m not going to tell you how to run your business.” He has dropped it. An admin now needs to understand “how a business actually makes money.” “I don’t think any admin’s going to survive at least until the next 5 years without having like a an entire, you know, RevOps mentality.”

For admins nervous about AI, he sees an opening. “There are a lot of experts but none of them have more than what three years of experience.” In the three months before the interview he had tried the Comet browser, OpenAI’s Atlas browser, Claude Code and agent.ai. “You can only upskill in it by actually doing and or implementing,” he said.

Where are the danger zones in a HubSpot portal?

Asked where admins get into trouble, Jorge began with a compliment. Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, he said, are “super boring” to look at. HubSpot is friendly, and “the over friendliness of the platform might make some danger zones more friendly than they should.” The delete button looks inviting. Installing an app takes one click on an orange button.

He tells admins to keep in mind what they are working in. “It’s a database,” he said, “a business’s back backbone,” and one bulk action can “mess up uh things for a lot of people in the organization.” If an area looks unfamiliar, “you probably should just take a pause there.”

AI connectors get the same care. The Claude and ChatGPT connectors are “super easy to set up,” and he wants admins to stay “security mindful” about what they let them read. HubSpot’s own connector for Claude, live since July 29, 2025, has read-only access to standard records and shows each user only the data their HubSpot permissions allow (HubSpot developer changelog). Check what any other connector can read and write before you install it.

When something does go wrong, many admins are on their own, the one HubSpot person in the company. At work, Jorge can ask George B. Thomas. Without someone like that, he goes to AI with as much context as he can give it, to Hub Helper Harry, and to HubSpot Support. He thinks Support has slipped since it started routing people to AI first. His workaround is to keep typing that you need a human until one joins the chat.

In the rapid-fire round, Lindsey asked him to choose between a custom object and a simple workflow. He builds both, and chose the workflow. “Anything that’s simpler I prefer.”

How to become a HubSpot admin, following Jorge’s path

• A month of theory, then practice. YouTube, ChatGPT and a few HubSpot Academy certifications cover the vocabulary. Jorge thinks a month is enough.
• Real work before the job. Test accounts, Upwork gigs and family projects put real problems in front of you.
• Certifications with a practicum. Start with the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub software certifications, and add others when a client problem calls for them.
• A RevOps view of the business. Learn how the company makes money and how marketing, sales and service connect.
• Ownership of inherited problems. Take the blame for the portal you inherited, then fix it.
• Respect for the database. Pause before deletes, app installs, bulk edits and AI connectors.

Jorge also said the career “pays really well.” ZipRecruiter’s listings for HubSpot administration roles showed a range of $56,000 to $120,000 a year in August 2026 (ZipRecruiter).

What should a new or aspiring admin do first?

If you are trying to break in, I would follow Jorge’s order as he gave it. Spend a month on the basics. Find a real portal to work in, even a family one. Keep a list of the problems you solved, and bring it to the interview, since a missing degree line in a job post has changed few hires.

If you already run a portal, his idea of ownership reaches past the settings to the people who use it. The admin who owns the portal ends up owning whether sales and marketing follow the process built into it. Supered shows that process to each HubSpot user while they work, and shows the admin who follows it. Our CRM best practices and HubSpot onboarding checklist are good places to start.