Salesforce Certification Matters

So your company implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud one year ago and so far running well. A top tier Salesforce consulting company help your company implement Sales Cloud with industry best practice. Within one year, you have been appointed as Salesforce administrator, you learn every single rule implemented in your Salesforce org, from custom field, validation rule, until workflow rule in all objects.

But, do you know that you may be just use 30% of Salesforce functionalities, and every year, Salesforce have 3 release which mean a lot of functionalities introduce in every 4 months.

How to learn the remaining 70% functionalities that you never aware, such as: Library, Chatter Actions, Collaborative Forecast, Territory Management, Communities, and so on, not to say the new functionalities every release.


Training
Try to convince your boss to secure budget to sit in Salesforce Administration Essentials for New Admins (ADM201), it is not cheap, but your company should get the benefits to have someone within the company who know and been trained well, the investment for this course should be worth for the company in long run.

I have attend a few training held by Salesforce University and I really recommend for you to attend it, to know Salesforce featured in depth, whether you are system administrator or new developer.

In this course you will learn all essentials skill you need to have be a good Salesforce admin. Here is the curriculum offered by Salesforce.

Certification
Another benefit if you take above course, you will get free voucher to sit for Salesforce Administrator exam. Why you need to be certified?
- to prove and demonstrate your credibility / professional skill
- to convince you have the knowledge and confidence to take full advantage of Salesforce
- to improve your productivity and process
- because you are certified, to maintain your certification active, you need to pass every release exam

Your Salesforce certification can be verified online (unless you opt-out) http://certification.salesforce.com/verification

Here is the complete Salesforce certification available right now, but this doesn't mean you need to take all of them.

Let me share a story when worked with a consultant without any certifications. The consultant said he has been 5 years in the industry, so no need to take any certifications. But, when the project going-on, we can see his skill is not really up to date and team not really able to work with him. So, beware when your company hiring consultant, make sure he/she is certified. Doing same thing for 5 years is equal to repeat the same job of 1 year for 5 times.

Salesforce Success Communities

Answering questions in Answer Success Communities will open your mind on what other users do with their Salesforce, you maybe never know what is report type? what is person account? Some of this is available for you to use for free in your Salesforce. Until the new Lightning Process Builder introduce recently in Spring '15 release.

So, come to https://success.salesforce.com/answers, if you have some questions need other users help, don't be shy to ask your questions, usually within minutes someone from some other parts of the world will response. If you know answer of question that someone ask, try to answer the question to help other user. Communities is helping each other...


Reference: Achieve Outstanding CRM Administration