Grow where you are planted - Salesforce Tutorial

(slow music) - All right, so you need two things, ideally, in order to land a Salesforce job. You need certification and you need experience. This course has been designed so that you can pass the certification exam and become an administrator. But then a lot of times, you will be speaking with hiring managers or recruiters, and they will want to see, or expect to see, some sort of relevant experience on your resume. And so, you might feel like, well, this is a catch-22 sort of situation, especially if you're changing careers. But I don't want you to worry about that a whole lot because, one, the demand is so great for Salesforce professionals that very minimal experience will usually be enough to get you a job because companies are frankly desperate to find people. And two, there's a lot of opportunities out there that you can utilize in order to get experience, in order to put that on a resume, in order to get hired. And then, finally, I personally know of people that have had neither certification or experience on a resume and still been hired as a Salesforce admin. And so, neither one of these are requirements, even though they may be listed as requirements on job openings on the various job boards. But I wanna speak a little bit right now about how to get those two things, the certification, which if you've done this course, you should be able to pass it at this point. The other is how to get the experience, how to get something on your resume 'cause it is crucial, I understand, if you're switching careers. And I was there as well a few years ago when I was switching from being primarily a technical writer and a trainer to a Salesforce developer, I got the certification and then I was able to get some hands-on experience. And how I did that is through a philosophy that I like to call grow where you're planted. So I was working for a software company as a technical writer. I was hired on there as a technical writer. At the time, I was studying for my Salesforce developer certification and I found out very quickly that this company used Salesforce to manage their cases. And so I volunteered, I rose my hand that in addition to my existing duties, I asked if I could be included in some of the solutions sessions that they were having with their Salesforce partner that they were using to solution some of their application builds and also got involved in creating some workflow rules and some case assignment rules and that sort of thing. And I recall that was when I first started doing things like customer portals, which are now known as customer communities, and got the opportunity to do branding of a customer community and even speak at a conference on Salesforce Chatter. And so even though I was technically a technical writer at the time for this company, I was doing Salesforce-related things that I could then in turn put on a resume. So once I got my certification, I updated my resume to have any and all relevant Salesforce experience I could muster and updated my Linkedin profile and updated my resume on the job boards. I started getting calls immediately. And so this idea of growing where you're planted means look for the opportunity to use Salesforce wherever you're at. If you're currently employed anywhere, find out first and foremost if they're using Salesforce in any capacity. If you can get your hands on a user license even as an end user, that will help you immensely in understanding and applying what you've learned on the platform and then work your way from there. And so, you may be able to volunteer for some opportunities to do some administrative work. It doesn't hurt to ask well, hey, can I get delegated administration rights or an administrator license and here's what I'm studying, here's what I'm doing. Usually these organizations are hard pressed for help and they're usually willing to grant you that access. There's other situations where you may be employed somewhere and they don't use Salesforce at all, and that's okay, and that's fine. You've now gone through the process if you're at the end of this course where you know how to sign up for a free Salesforce developer account and there's nothing stopping you from signing up for another developer account. And you can use that account to then create customized applications for your current employer. And you can do it on your own time as a learning exercise and use that as a proof of concept to then show to the powers that be, to your supervisors, and really try to pinpoint or hone in on any sort of processes that tend to be email and spreadsheet heavy. And what I mean by that are there's a lot of times there's processes that happen in a company where people are emailing back and forth a spreadsheet and it's really unclear who made what edit and what's the latest version that's out there, what's the gold standard, what's the latest version of truth, and it's just a mess to manage. And so if you have any sort of scenario like that, you can very easily create a few custom objects and create some automation and even utilize the few user licenses that are available through this developer account in order to spec out or build out a proof of concept for the company that you work for. What that does is that gives you real-world experience and something you can put on a resume and something that someone else can verify for you if you had a reference need or that sort of thing. So, these free Salesforce developer accounts that they make available are not intended for production use, and so I'm not advocating creating something on these free accounts and then using it for the remainder of time. The idea of this is to give you experience to build something out and then if you get buy in from your supervisors or the powers that be and they see the value and the savings of time, and money, and effort, or just showing a better way of doing things, a lot of times that's what will convince decision makers to decide in favor of Salesforce and buy some licenses, and then from there, you may find yourself in line for a promotion. But even then, it doesn't really matter because if you were hired on as a technical writer, for instance, or whatever the case may be, if you're shifting gears and shifting to being a Salesforce administrator or Salesforce professional in any form or fashion, once you have the certification and you have one tidbit of experience on your resume, it's not gonna be long before recruiters are hounding you. And so, if your current employer looks at you as like well, I hired you and I want to keep you in this square and this is where you belong, you know, that's fine. Stay where you're at, grow where you're planted, but keep your options open, update your resume. And what I'm telling you is it's not gonna be long before, if you interview well and you can handle yourself in an interview, then you shouldn't have a problem advancing the career ladder into the cloud. And with each of these steps, you can expect to be able to command a better salary and then from there the options are limitless as far as flexibility like remote opportunities and then just all the different career paths that you can take. I just want to encourage you to see this out and watch it play out and not just look at the obstacles like well, I don't have any experience. Well, get the experience. There's ways to do that. So grow where you're planted is the first principle.