Salesforce

[Amplus]

Someone was telling me the other day that Salesforce is a seriously in demand IT skill to learn and is open to people from all backgrounds without IT skills once certified. Path starts from Salesforce Administrator (looked online and salary is roughly £30k), to Salesforce Developer to Business Anaylst.

Anyone got experience in Salesforce and can confirm whether it's something worth learning and is in demand??

 

[Diddums]

We have a Salesforce team at work and I can tell you they're always screaming for talent. Take this with a pinch of salt though, that's all I can tell you.

 

[Martynt74]

Is it something you're interested in?

How do you plan to start learning it? It's not particularly open source and without being in a company which uses it and in a role which supports it i'm not sure how you'd get any experience with it.


A similar package would by Microsoft Dynamics AX. I was in a role for around 6 months and had experience with it and helping set it up and i'm constantly getting emails from recruiters about roles specific to AX. Again though i'm not sure how you'd get your "in"

 

[dowie]

I'm not sure it is a good idea to base a career around a single bit of technology. What do you actually want to do career wise - that might be the better thing to think about first.

Also what you currently do at the moment is perhaps a big factor too here. I mean you can get say a project management qualification after a 2 day course if you like but it doesn't mean you'll necessarily be able to become a project manager - it is potentially useful to some people but utterly worthless to others.

I'd be a bit skeptical that say some short course or certification in salesforce would be worth much without other experience to go with it. I mean if you currently stack shelves in Tesco with no experience in IT or sales then what are you really adding? On the other hand if you're already working in say a sales admin role or something then sure, I guess if you then apply for a similar role in a different company where it is used then that might be a useful thing to mention/highlight...

 

[Lopéz]

I've been working with Salesforce for about 4 years, I am currently a Salesforce Consultant at a company in the Midlands. We are always struggling to find good Salesforce talent and so is the rest of the industry, so that much is correct.
I'd say you don't need an IT background as such, but you do need to be reasonably tech savvy.
Admin/Dev/BA is not really a career path in my eyes - they are completely different job roles with different skillsets etc needed for each of them.

What floats your boat?
In basic terms:
Admin - Does day to day config changes - new fields, new objects, relationships. Reports, dashboards. Security, access. Potentially automation. Possibly lots of data management. Underpaid job in the UK.
Dev - Writes code. This is a totally different role to an Admin, if you are not into coding then this is not the role for you.
BA - Whilst you can get Salesforce specific BAs my advice would be to train as a more general BA and be system agnostic. Remember as a BA you are about requirement, not solution.
Architect - Solutionising from an enterprise/holistic level. Well paid job.
Consultant - For me this is the fun bit. Asking people what they want, speccing it, building it (or getting a Dev to build some of it), demo it and hand it over to the customer. You need a lot of Admin skills and some Dev knowledge (if not ability - I cannot write a single line of code)
I love my job!

The certifications are 100% worth doing, they are not easy, and carry a decent amount of credibility in the industry. But without experience it's difficult to learn or apply any of it.

Although Marv says it's not very open source, it sort of is. Sign up to Trailhead and you can create your own Salesforce system and tweak it to your heart's content, either using the Trailhead learning paths, or just going rogue and doing what you fancy.

 

[Amplus]

I've been working with Salesforce for about 4 years, I am currently a Salesforce Consultant at a company in the Midlands. We are always struggling to find good Salesforce talent and so is the rest of the industry, so that much is correct.
I'd say you don't need an IT background as such, but you do need to be reasonably tech savvy.
Admin/Dev/BA is not really a career path in my eyes - they are completely different job roles with different skillsets etc needed for each of them.

What floats your boat?
In basic terms:
Admin - Does day to day config changes - new fields, new objects, relationships. Reports, dashboards. Security, access. Potentially automation. Possibly lots of data management. Underpaid job in the UK.
Dev - Writes code. This is a totally different role to an Admin, if you are not into coding then this is not the role for you.
BA - Whilst you can get Salesforce specific BAs my advice would be to train as a more general BA and be system agnostic. Remember as a BA you are about requirement, not solution.
Architect - Solutionising from an enterprise/holistic level. Well paid job.
Consultant - For me this is the fun bit. Asking people what they want, speccing it, building it (or getting a Dev to build some of it), demo it and hand it over to the customer. You need a lot of Admin skills and some Dev knowledge (if not ability - I cannot write a single line of code)
I love my job!

The certifications are 100% worth doing, they are not easy, and carry a decent amount of credibility in the industry. But without experience it's difficult to learn or apply any of it.

Although Marv says it's not very open source, it sort of is. Sign up to Trailhead and you can create your own Salesforce system and tweak it to your heart's content, either using the Trailhead learning paths, or just going rogue and doing what you fancy.

That's interesting to read. Thanks for that.

I am actually moving back to the West Midlands. Do you know any companies in the area where I can look at potential roles??

The Salesforce admins salary when I've looked generally seems to be around the £30k mark which isn't to bad.

 

[Lopéz]

Not many people are going to be interested if you have no experience with the platform unfortunately. You will struugle to get a 30k Admin role without at least a couple of years experience.

 

[Mattyjw]

Not many people are going to be interested if you have no experience with the platform unfortunately. You will struugle to get a 30k Admin role without at least a couple of years experience.

Not op but how would you recommend getting recognised experience. Would trailhead examples count?

 

[Martynt74]

@lopez I stand corrected!

I think the best way would be to look for maybe junior admin roles or even try and find companies who use Salesforce and then look for generic jobs there and hope to segway into Salesforce from there.

It's one thing knowing how to use a software, which i presume Trailhead gives you, but you're not getting pracital workplace experience which i'd expect people would want. Ultimately you might be able to use the software but not particularly know their way around practical implementations of it.

Bit like if i wanted an analyst and listed Excel as a requirement. I could find someone who knows all the formulae in the world from using Excel at home, but if they can't use it to create a decent working model using practical data they're of no use to me.

 

[Lopéz]

Marv is right - you need business context and application.

My advice would be to get over 100 Trailhead badges, and focus as much as you can on Superbadges as they are much harder and carry a decent chunk of credibility.

 

[Martynt74]

Yay, i'm not wrong all the time

Yours is a role i think i'd love, albeit with software i'm more familiar with. From that consulting point of view how much IT database/SQL knowledge do you need?

Our firm is in the process of implementing a new data warehouse/dashboard suite and my aim is to get well involved in that implementation and try and take in and play with things as much as i can and then try and push out into consultancy with it.

 

[dowie]

Not op but how would you recommend getting recognised experience. Would trailhead examples count?

I think he meant work experience rather than just experience playing around with the software at home.

I mean the obvious way to get experience with a bit of technology would be to get a job at a company that uses it or convince a current employer to start using it.

You'd perhaps be a bit more credible applying for a developer role that might involve salesforce if you're already a developer or likewise an admin role involving using salesforce if you're already in an admin role supporting a sales team or using some CRM software etc... but then again everyone has to start somewhere!

I just think the OP is going about this the wrong way - he's made a few threads in here about wanting to become an analyst, maybe I'm wrong and maybe getting a bit of salesforce knowledge is some shortcut/easy way into a job that would fulfil the OPs ambitions but personally I'd avoid the shortcuts and aim to get the general skillset required for the desired role first and then look at getting some specific knowledge of a particular technology on top of that. If you want to be a developer then train to become a developer first ditto to a BA etc.. getting any experience in the desired role would be more useful IMHO, but I guess great if the role happens to involve salesforce too if for some reason OP likes the sound of learning that particular application.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

I used to do Salesforce admin, had to learn on the fly about it. Worked pretty good once I got my head around it. Settings are a minefield though.

 

[Skynet5]

It's a massively popular platform. Go for it. Trailhead is your friend. If you enjoy it, you'll enjoy your job.

Point a click... The skill is applying it to solve the problem.

 

[mr tommo]

A similar package would by Microsoft Dynamics AX. I was in a role for around 6 months and had experience with it and helping set it up and i'm constantly getting emails from recruiters about roles specific to AX. Again though i'm not sure how you'd get your "in"

I'm 4 years into a career in AX/Dynamics 365 finance and operations (rolls off the tongue...) No IT background but came into the industry from more of a business side of things. Started on a graduate scheme on £18k as a graduate consultant. I love it, every day is a different challenge, one day it could be designing and speccing extensions to the standard Microsoft offering to suit a customer's processes, the next day you could be advising the customer to redesign their own process to work with the standard process in Dynamics in a different area. Lots of involvement with developers too working on designs and getting involved with the testing processes.

I find it interesting getting inside some of these really big companies and see how they operate. Also some of the latest stuff Microsoft are doing is amazing with hololens and their business applications

Should say the CRM part of dynamics is far less well paid than AX/F&O.

No experience with Sales force but and kind of ERP software tends to pay pretty well. Yes you are tied into one brand but the skills are completely transferable.n

 

[chroniclard]

Salesforce development can be fairly complicated, helps if you have a programming background, I did it for about 6 months before deciding I didn't want to focus on Salesforce and left.

The trailheads are a good start, they give you a good basic understanding of the platform and the more advanced ones do get quite complex. However I found when actually coding real tasks they were far from comprehensive. I did a fair few badges and started on the super badges but got bored.

I am unsure if you could actually get a job based on doing trailheads, if there is certification perhaps?

 

[TNGL]

There's a guy on LinkedIn who left a job in sales & trading at Goldman to join Salesforce Enterprise and so it must not be that bad unless this was the outcome of a mental breakdown.

 

[dowie]

Maybe he wasn't doing too well, maybe he missed out on a promotion - not unusual to move from banking to tech firms anyway.

Anyway with regards to the OP's ambitions here working at a big tech firm is a bit of a different ball game to some IT bod doing some certification/learning to use that company's products.

It's like someone asking about Microsoft certifications for some IT careers and then talking about someone actually working at Microsoft in a highly paid role.

 

[Lopéz]

He didn't say he wanted to work for Salesforce? He wanted to work in the Salesforce arena, which is not the same.
There are thousand of people (like me) who work in the Salesforce arena full time but don't actually work for Salesforce themselves

 

[MrRockliffe]

Our whole database of partners (customers) is run through salesforce, so I would absolutely say it's worth doing