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!
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