Week full of learning on Journey to Salesforce - #Journey2Salesforce

Previous week was full of learning and expanding my knowledge of the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce Certification Days organized by Salesforce had a series of Webinars on Admin, Advanced Admin, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud Certifications.  Each webinar was approximately 6 hours long session with luckily some breaks in between:--) . Trainers on these webinars were certified Salesforce Instructors and left no stone upturned to ensure that important concepts & curriculum for the relevant certification is thoroughly covered and well explained.

I attended all the five Webinars (around 30 hours of learning) to ensure at least I get a high-level overview of each of the Salesforce Product or feature set being discussed in the webinar. While the focus was towards certifications however in between demos of the features were helpful to understand and get a real time experience on the functionalities and their potential implementations in real world.  After reviewing these products through webinars and some online exploration I have solidified my pursuit on the path for being a Salesforce Consultant (out of various job roles) as this relates to my current day to day job of being in Salesforce advisory and consultancy role as a Business Analyst. By virtue of these webinars, this week I am also meeting by organization Director to discuss about various Salesforce features that can be adopted and implemented in our business context. I hope he will be impressed by the suggestions and thought process around it. 😊.

Apart from these live webinars there is one another great learning initiative currently running in Salesforce Ohana and that is the Journey to Salesforce Program (#Journey2Salesforce). This program is meant for people looking to build career or transitioning their career to Salesforce Eco-system. Program seems to be well-designed and utilizes various trailhead modules with guided and well thought after six trailmixes along with mentorship opportunities and Ask Me Anything (AMA) webinars with community experts. I have completed my first trailmix on this program which was towards orientation of the platform basics, data model & basic customization on the platform and it was great to brush up few concepts which I have been reviewing from last few months along with an opportunity to build a Lemonade Stand App (my first app) 😊

Also, not to forget there are some great trailblazer community events lined up in my city in coming months and I have registered myself as a participant on these community events related to TrailheadDx Global Gathering, Journey to Salesforce (J2S) and Pardot. I look forward to learn and meet few new trailblazers during these events to continue on my journey towards being a Salesforce Professional. 

Happy Trailblazing 😊

My Inclination towards training & preparation for Salesforce certifications.

I read various posts and articles where people usually indicated their first encounter with Salesforce was either as an end user or being an accidental admin, wherein a Salesforce admin in the company left the job and some other employee was asked to fill that role and thus became Salesforce admin by accident. 😊 But, that is not how I landed up into the Salesforce world. My first encounter with Salesforce was as a Software Tester wherein having tested many business/web applications in my area, I was brought to a project that involved testing of Salesforce.

At that time, I would have never imagined that its such a vast application and a lot we can do with it to automate the business processes and that too with so much ease and without much coding 😊. Traditionally, I have been testing applications where there was extensive coding and each change had to go through the deployment and review processes and there were hardly any configuration-based tweaks that could have changed the application functionality at greater scale. However, Salesforce is totally different and there was greater power in configuration settings too and that way I started exploring more about Salesforce features and options (fiddling with Setup menu and object manager).  My Testing efforts also shifted towards verifying configurations & settings rather than doing bug hunting around boundary values and field level checks.

As days & months passed, multiple Salesforce stories and functionalities started coming under my to-do items primarily for testing sign-off to ensure the functionality works as it is intended and defects are fixed before releasing the same to end users.  These stories also started giving me exposure to various Salesforce terminologies and features like Workflows, Process Builder, E-mail to Case, Case Assignment rules etc. Gradually, I started liking this Salesforce exploration and this exploration journey expanded my role towards business analysis. I started providing inputs to developers & business and steadily started working to bridge the gap between business stakeholders and technology professionals with Salesforce platform being at the center of the conversations.

As a Business Analyst it is vital that you manage the stakeholder’s expectations as sometimes it might be overwhelming to over commit on deliverable within specified timelines. It is important to involve and take inputs from the development team who can help to assess the capabilities and limitations of the Salesforce Platform. Increasing your knowledge on the Salesforce Platform and keeping up to the latest developments/releases/features is essential to do justice to the job and offer value to the stakeholders. Thus, I started looking for some formal certifications & training around Salesforce to ensure I have the latest and relevant conceptual knowledge on the Salesforce Platform.

Luckily, I came across the post on Salesforce website about Salesforce Certification Days wherein Salesforce has been offering Free certification preparation webinars along with $70 discount coupon towards any $200 Certification exam.  As soon as I saw the post, I was game for it and immediately registered for the “Preparing for your Salesforce Administrator Certification” Exam Webinar as my first choice followed by others. Also, I enrolled for Journey to Salesforce program offered by Salesforce to gain knowledge and further upgrade my skills on the platform.

Learning is a lifelong process and with advent of Internet you are never far away from awesome learning resources/mentors, then be it anything you want to learn and get mastery/certified on. Salesforce provides immense free resources and opportunities and with these free resources in hand started my formal Salesforce Certifications Journey on path to be a Salesforce Professional.

Happy Learning. Let’s keep blazing the trails!

Salesforce - Certifications

By now we know Trailhead is a great place to learn about Salesforce however one may get overwhelmed with so much learning content available on trailhead and you may (or may not) face the “Problem of Plenty”. Looking at so much content that is available on the platform, one might wonder where to start and which all modules or trails to complete in the beginning.

The answer to this lies in what Job role you are planning to take up in the Salesforce world. There are plenty of trails and certifications recommended by Salesforce to support each Job role. This is where I believe Certifications can really help to follow a structured and guided learning path while you aim to pursue a job role.

It doesn’t matter if you are starting as a Salesforce Admin or aspire to be a Salesforce Architect, there is a  related certification/s and suggested learning path around it. Table below has the list of various Certifications offered by Salesforce.

Now the next self-assigned task for me is to pick my first certification and follow the learning path for the same towards the making of a Salesforce Professional. Hauʻoli (Happy Learning) 😊 

Administrators	Consultants	Developers	Specialists	Architects
Salesforce Certified Administrator	Marketing Cloud Consultant	Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder *	CPQ Specialist	Data Architecture and Management Designer *
Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator	Sales Cloud Consultant	Platform Developer I * $	Marketing Cloud Email Specialist	Sharing & Visibility Designer*
	Service Cloud Consultant	Platform Developer II	Pardot Specialist	Integration Architecture Designer $
	Community Cloud Consultant	B2C Commerce Developer		Identity and Access Management Designer $
	Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant			Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer $
	Field Service Lightning Consultant			Mobile Solutions Architecture Designer
	Nonprofit Cloud Consultant			B2C Commerce Technical Solution Designer
	Pardot Consultant			Application Architect (Credential is attained on completing * marked certifications)
				System Architect (Credential is attained on completing $ marked certifications)
				Technical Architect (Credential is attained upon completing Application Architect and System Architect levels and a Review Board)