Downloading the Salesforce Administrator Exam Guide - Salesforce Tutorial

- So now we're going to talk about the different sections of the exam guide. And I've got a printout here, and I'll show you on my screen as well how this course will be laid out. Now Salesforce has recently released an update to their exam guide, which was formerly called the study guide, so if you ever hear me or anyone else talking about the study guide this is what I'm talking about. It's the exam guide, it's the official document from Salesforce. It's about 15 pages long and it goes through what is now the 12 sections of the certification exam. There's been a log of questions about how to find the exam guide. So if you go to certification.saleforce.com, if you go to the Credentials link here on the top left, you see either on the drop down, this section for administrators, or there on the left, here as well, if you go to the Credentials page is the administrators link, so click on that. And if you scroll down here, you've got options for the certified administrator or the certified advanced administrator. Now also I've gotten questions of what all this course includes. This just covers the certified administrator exam, not the advanced administrator. This course deals with what is known as the Admin 201. Now if we click See Details under the Certified Administrator section, you can scroll down as well, and you see information about the exam and this is good to become familiar with. There's 60 multiple choice questions. And there also may be two to five unscored questions that may be added on your exam. And that's Salesforce's way of now vetting new questions for the certification exam. And so if you start your test and you have like 62 to 65 questions, don't let them throw you, you may have some newer material on there and those newer questions won't be graded. And so they also have a note here that you may have more than 60 questions. I've also seen Salesforce allot more time to the test taker for those that are selected for additional questions. So there's a 90 minute allotted time by default for the exam and then a 65% passing score. I'll have more towards the end of this course related to test taking strategies and answer questions around how to take the test. And also just one thing to note though for these multiple choice questions, would be that whenever there's a multiple select question where you need to select two or more correct answers, Salesforce will be very explicit in how many answers you need to select. And so they will tell you select the two correct answers or select the three et cetera. And you can't proceed in the test or submit it if you're short or long on the number of questions that you've selected. So radio button on the test will be a single selection, a checkbox will be a multiple selection, and they will tell you very specifically how many to select. Also encourage you to go through these sample questions on the exam guide. This will give you an idea of some of the types of questions that you'll encounter on the test. Let's click on this link here that says for full exam outline, click here for the exam guide. So if we click on that, that will go to, that's going to my downloads, but I've got it up here. And this is the certification exam guide for the certified administrator for summer 17. Now there was a significant thing that happened with this particular course and certification on the summer 17 release, which came July 17th of 2017. I'm recording this shortly thereafter, and the main takeaway is that Salesforce has condensed down from 15 knowledge areas to 12. And that's kind of a welcome change because there were a few areas of the exam that weren't weighted very heavily and so they've combined some of those is all that's about. So this course is up-to-date and I have worked on rearranging the lectures, where they fall so that we follow along with the sections of the exam guide. And so once again, here's the information about the exam with the passing score, the cost to register, the cost to retake, and you can take the test online or onsite. I've got information towards the end of this course about that. Recommended training and references, and so there's some instructor-led training courses that are a week long, they're very good, but also very expensive. They also mention Trailhead, which I do encourage you to supplement what you learn here with Trailhead. And then also just to answer another quick question, my course and curriculum is something that I created myself from the years of experience of being a developer and administrator on the platform. And so this course is not the official curriculum from Salesforce, but something that I created based on my own real world experience so that you understand the concepts that you need to know in order to pass the exam. So with this new exam guide, though, these 12 knowledge areas are the organization setup, global UI. You see here the weighting and these may change over time and so I always encourage students to look at the latest and greatest exam guide that's available from certification.salesforce.com. But the time of this recording you see the weighting for each of these sections. And then after organization setup and global UI, we have user setup, and then we have security and access. And this is where we get into profiles and roles and permission sets, also known as personas. And we're getting into some of the meatier topics of the course. So you notice that we start out early with some of the global UI and the organization setup. That's some of the foundational things when you're first getting started and getting oriented to the layout. And then we set up your user account in the course. And then we get into the nitty gritty of the security and access concerns. And so I feel like the best way to structure a course is to follow the structure of the exam guide, 'cause I feel like it's laid out logically. Also you'll want to become familiar with these different bullet points that you find on the exam guide and I strive to cover every topic that you find in these bulleted points in this course and then also you can always look on Trailhead for supplemental information related to these bullets. And then next we've got standard and custom objects. We deal a lot with standard objects, custom objects, standard fields, custom fields, and the ins and outs and nuances of all that. And then beyond that, we go into sales and marketing applications, that's where we'll get into leads and contacts and accounts and opportunities. And then we've got service and support applications, weighted a little less. And that's where we get into cases and knowledge. And then beyond that, activity management and collaboration. This is one of the newer combined sections, there used to be a section for activity management on the old admin exam guide and it was weighted at 2%, and then collaboration means Chatter, anytime you see the word collaboration that means Chatter. And that was weighted at 1%, which really threw me because how do you do 1% weighting on a 60 question test. Is it like sometimes it'll be on the test and sometimes it's not? So they've combined those two and that's a very welcome change for my perspective. It just makes things easier to condense down the knowledge areas. So that's where you get into feeds and groups and activity managements, which has to do with tasks and events, and even Cloud Scheduler, which Cloud Scheduler's on the way out. But also you'll see things in this course that are still reflected in the exam guide even though they've been retired by Salesforce. And so I try to make notes around that so that, you know there's some things that may not even be available in your own free developer or Trailhead account. And so I've left those in this course strategically because it still may be appearing on the exam. And it seems like the questions really lag behind because as an admin you'll be tasked with inheriting organizations that have been around for years and sometimes there'll be legacy functionality that Salesforce has retired that you still have access to. And so you need to be able to administer on those older things. Next is data management, that's where we get into some fun things with data manipulation and uploading or upserting, inserting records, deleting, et cetera. And there's a lot that you'll have to do as an admin in the data management space. And then we get into the reports and dashboards and that has a pretty significant weighting as well. You'll have questions on the exam related to the different types of reports, the different types of dashboards, so understanding all of that's very important to passing the test. And then we've got workflow and process automation. This is one that's been recently renamed. We're starting to get more hints around the process builder. And that's a newer automation tool available in Salesforce and it's called Lightening Process Builder and so they've renamed this workflow slash process automation 'cause we're going beyond workflow rules now into the process builder. And understanding what you can do with each of those tools is very helpful. We'll go into all that in that section. And then finally we've got a few other one percenters here. We've got desktop and mobile administration and Appexchange. So that should be 12 knowledge areas. Let me check that real quick. Yes, so we've got the 12 knowledge areas concluding with desktop and mobile administration and Appexchange. I would not be surprised to see Salesforce combine these two in the next release or two. And so the main thing is if the exam guide, when you're taking this course, does not exactly match up with what you see on the screen, it is going to be fine because the concepts that are covered in this course are still the same and you can always find the latest exam guide by going to certification.salesforce.com and clicking on the administrator track and selecting Administrator and then just look for the exam guide link. So now that you've gotten a brief overview of the exam guide and an idea of what lies ahead, let's jump into the next section of this course.