Description
Get certified with confidence in DevOps Launchpad’s webinar: your expert guide to passing Salesforce certification exams.
With the new updates to Salesforce’s certification experience, now is the perfect time to upskill and improve your chances of passing your next exam. Join DevOps Launchpad and 10x Salesforce-certified DevOps Advocate Rob Cowell for a 30-minute webinar packed with practical tips, expert advice, and actionable strategies.
In this session, you’ll discover everything you need to know to pass your next certification with confidence. Whether you’re prepping for a Salesforce cert exam, or specializing with one of our DevOps Launchpad certifications, Rob will walk you through every step of the journey — from choosing the right certification to making the most of your study time. Learn more with these resources:
Transcript
without further ado, I'm very excited to introduce you to today's speaker, Rob Cowell, a DevOps advocate at Gearset. So if everyone's ready to get started, Rob, I shall hand straight over to you.
Fantastic. Thanks, Amy.
So, yep, as Amy says, today's session is indeed how to pass your Salesforce certification exam. I'm gonna be sharing some top tips and strategies, and approaches on how to achieve that.
So let's click on the right window so I can move slides. That would help. Here we go. Okay. So, yep, first off, the traditional about me slide. As Amy says, I am one of the DevOps advocates here at Gearset.
My job is to educate and inform and and share best practice with folks like you in the community.
But in the context of today's webinar around certifications, yes, I I do have ten certifications, that I've kinda built up over the last, oh, fifteen years now. So I certainly haven't rushed them, which is a key tip, but I've I've acquired a few over the years. So let's get into about how we can follow those footsteps and and get some certifications of our own.
Now before we dive into those study tips, couple of things that I want to highlight. The main thing is that the the process around how we get our Salesforce certification exams has changed. So Salesforce historically has used a platform called WebAssessor for all its certification exams, and that's changed. So now it's actually gonna be using the same platform as their trail trailhead academy, which is run on a platform called Pearson VUE. The behind the scenes is less important. What's actually important is that there's this consolidated user interface, hopefully a lot more streamlined, a lot smoother.
All our certifications, all our Trailhead badges, superbadges, etcetera, are likely to be in the same place. It's a lot more simplified in terms of how we onboard for that. There's still the usual processes to make sure that, you know, we are fulfilling the requirements of the exam. So things like ID verification, checking that your room is suitably set up for study and and for sitting the exam.
So no no notes sitting there. No one in the corner whispering the answers to you. Nothing like that. But we we're all professionals.
We know the rules. But it does make things a lot easier with this new consolidated platform to actually go through that process and have all our content for exams prepared for us. So just a little thing to bear in mind if you have got a certification or two already and and you're looking to do your next one, you might see a change coming in real soon. I haven't got a date on that one just yet, but look for Salesforce's announcements on it.
If you look for Salesforce Academy perhaps or Trailhead Academy, you should be able to find that information quite easily.
So having set that little bit of the scene, let's dive into what it actually takes to get those certifications.
First thing we want to do is obviously decide which certification we really want to do. And there's a quite a wide range of certifications available from the entry level stuff, such as the associate, all the way up to the expert stuff for, you know, the the advanced development stuff and some of those ones with the word architect in their title.
You know, work out where your focus is, where your level is. I'll talk about a few of the sort of most common ones that people tend to aim for, as they start their, certification journey. So the first up is the the Salesforce associate. That one is ideal for beginners because it does give, like, a solid grounding in Salesforce fundamentals, but not quite to the same level of depth as the admin exam is gonna have.
Now speaking of that admin exam, it's perfect for people that are admins. You know, if you're managing Salesforce day to day, you're gonna have a bit of a head start, but don't expect an easy ride on this one. It is one of the broadest exams with the most amount of Salesforce features and capabilities. Now we're not expecting you to be, you know, a full on architect and know the platform to that level, but be prepared that you're gonna touch on a lot of features straddling a lot of functionality, whether that's Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Flows, Config, Lightning pages to an extent, and certainly how to make use of them rather than how to build them.
That tends to get extended out a little bit more when we look at the platform app builder. As the name suggests, it's for folks that are building apps, and so if you're creating those custom applications mostly with clicks not code, you'll find there's quite a lot of overlap with the areas that that covers between app builder and the admin exam.
But there's more focus on not just knowing, like, how the platform works and what the features are, but how to apply those features, how to bring them together to give to fulfill a given scenario.
And for those of you that are slightly more code focused, of course, we've got the the platform developer one and two.
I I have the first one. I haven't got round to the second one yet.
But those developer exams are focused on, as you can expect, things like Apex, lightning web components, little bit of integrations.
And as the name suggests, that's more for the the programmatic pro code side of Salesforce.
But don't worry if you're not necessarily in a hands on role either because there's certifications available in the Salesforce world for business analysts, marketing professionals, strategy designers, UX designers. There's absolutely something for everyone across every role you can think of in our ecosystem. So have a think about what your career goals are and try and find a certification that aligns quite well to those.
So the next thing is to think about the official resources for those exams, and Salesforce does give you a lot of those tools that you're gonna need, things such as Trailhead. You know, we can't we can't talk about training in Salesforce without mentioning Trailhead. You've got your interactive learning modules, projects, and super badges, some of which are actually tailored to those exams.
Within those trails on Trailhead for the exams, you're gonna find your exam guides. These are your blueprints, and it shows you what the topics are covered are, what weighting is attached to those topics. So, you know, some areas of an exam will will be represent, say, ten to twelve percent of the exam. Others may be anything up to, like, forty percent of the exam depending on how much material needs to be covered and the depth of of that topic that they expect you to know about. So you'll get an idea of a bit of that structure by reading the official exam guide.
And don't underestimate underestimate the Salesforce documentation.
It is the official resource.
Sometimes we we look at that and actually things have moved on between releases and the documentation may not have caught up. But for the purposes of certification exams, the documentation is considered your official resource. So it allows you to dig deeper into those really tricky topics from the official documentation if you really want to get that full understanding.
And, of course, you know, if your learning style isn't necessarily sitting there reading everything, you know, if you're more comfortable with videos and webinars such as this one, then, you know, it's possible to learn visually from Salesforce experts and community leaders and recordings of webinars available on Trailhead and on Salesforce's other sites as well.
And don't forget as well, there's sample questions available. So as you look at those exam guides, as you look at those trails on Trailhead that are related to each of those exams, you're gonna get two or three, sometimes as much as five, sample questions. So you just get a feel for the type of question that they're gonna be asking and the level of complexity that they're likely to expect you to to delve into.
And don't forget the Salesforce community. The wonderful folks out there such as yourselves and and beyond, that's your secret weapon really. You know, get involved in those forums and Discords and Slacks and even your local trailblazer community groups. You know, turning up in person is always a lot of fun because you'll find these are absolute gold mine of shared experience.
A lot of your peers will have done these exams or be working towards them. You know, you can even form, like, little study groups amongst folks that you meet on in these areas, either virtual or in person. And it's just so useful to be able to bounce ideas off other people and get their experience and test your knowledge, test their knowledge. You know, everyone pitches in to to help each other succeed, I guess.
And, you know, there's also the the big headline events like Dreamforce and TDX.
Now they have boot camps and and training and, you know, opportunities to prepare for an exam with instructor led training as well, which is really useful. And don't worry if you can't actually attend those in person because they do have a lot of virtual options as well. So, you know, do remember that, you know, the community is out there to help you in in every step of your Salesforce journey.
Now, all that theory, fantastic, but hands on practice is really where that magic's gonna happen.
I recommend folks getting a a free Salesforce developer edition to explore features, test out those scenarios, and build up a little bit of confidence. Now they're they're quite similar to the Trailhead's playgrounds, but a little more sort of free reign, I would say. The the playground sometimes can be narrowly focused to solving the problems of that badge. They might be, like, preloaded with with stuff that relates to that Trailhead module.
Whereas with the developer edition, you've got a lot more scope to to go and play and build things. So if you've read something on a a training course or on a Trailhead module, I think, I wanna try that in my org. You know, don't do it in your production org. Please, please, please don't do that.
Even even, you know, a sandbox that might not necessarily be yours but be your company's, it's far better to get a developer edition, and start exploring in that way. And bonus points now, the developer edition orgs have been uplifted to include Agent Force and Data Cloud, if those are things that you, wanna roll up your sleeves and have a play with.
Now, even if you're going for one of the specialist certifications, something like CPQ or, marketing cloud or something, it's kind of important that you master the fundamentals of Salesforce before we kinda reach that level. Because at some point along that journey, they're gonna be involved and overlap with your specialism.
So things in the it's kind of platform basics, objects, fields, relationships, user interface. Make sure you've got that down. Don't try and aim too high too soon.
Other important areas are data management, so importing, exporting, cleaning up that data. Security, super, super important. So make sure you've got your head around profiles, permissions sets, sharing rules, all that great stuff.
Be Be familiar with a bit of automation.
You know, workflow rules and process builder have long since gone. Flow is just the way forward for automation now. But just be aware of Flow's capabilities, especially, like, if you look at the release notes for the the upcoming release, there's quite a few new features coming out in Flow. Always good to to be on top of those. Reports and dashboards, the bread and butter of every admin. So make sure, you know, you can do filters and charts and, you know, you understand data visibility, why things show, why things don't show.
Have an understanding of customizing the UI. So, you know, be comfortable with lightning app builder, with page layouts, with quick actions, all the different ways that we can customize our platform. Now I'm not necessarily saying that, you know, when you do a specialist exam, all of these topics are gonna be covered. That's mostly stuff that's gonna be in the admin or the associate exam.
But if you're gonna go for a specialty exam, even if you haven't got the one of those two exams beforehand, make sure that you're up to speed with some of these areas. It'll just make life so much easier for you.
So the next thing we want to talk about is practice exams. They are so, so useful. I I rely on them myself when I do certifications.
They're absolutely vital for understanding the format of the exam. So majority of the Salesforce certification exams are multiple choice.
From a a wide set, they select a a subset of that wider pool of questions. So you're not necessarily always gonna get the same questions on successive runs, but you get an idea of the flavor of the type of questions that they're gonna be doing and also the pacing. You know, you can measure yourself against the timing of those exams.
And one of the things that I always like to do when I'm doing those exams is just do a dry run before my study because then I know what I know and what I don't know. So, for example, you know, if I've been working on the platform for a number of years, you know, there are tasks that I will carry out in an org day to day as part of my job. I'm gonna be pretty confident with those, at least I hope I am. So when I do the the practice exam, you know, I can confirm that knowledge and, you know, I get that affirmation that I know what I'm talking about. But then I can also very quickly zoom in on the areas that I'm not so familiar with. And then those are the things that I can go and read about, study, watch those webinars, whatever method I want to take to make sure that I'm laser focused on the knowledge gaps.
Now there's a couple of platforms that are probably the most popular for these practice exams. So Focus on Force is was probably one of the first out of the gates and certainly the one that that most people know about. And they have practice exams and study guides and guided learning and all types of resources around confirming that knowledge across most, if not all, of the certifications.
Equally, Salesforce Ben, the big name in in Salesforce content on on the web, they also have practice exams and and, study and and course material that you can work through. So these are all pretty high quality and based off the material on Trailhead, based on the the official study guides and the documentation, so they accurately reflect what you're likely to face in that exam.
As you continue to revise, do another exam. Hopefully, you'll see an improvement. You know, hopefully, you don't sort of forget everything that you already knew. But the idea is that incrementally, you're moving further and further towards success in those exams.
But it's important to be organized. Proper preparation prevents poor performance.
There are variations on on that one, but, you get the idea with all those p's.
And the key part of that is to get a good study plan.
A good study plan will have a a realistic target date and certainly focus on force. I haven't tried Salesforce Ben yet, but focus on force definitely allows you to put a flag down for this is when I'm aiming for my exam.
The advantage of doing that, not just on that platform but in general, is that you then know how much time you've got between today and when I'm doing my exam, and you can see how much content you need to cover, and it's just simple arithmetic. You break it up into manageable chunks. By this date, I need to have covered this much material. You know, I need to have covered at the end of week one, I need to have covered this area. Week two, this area. It makes it far more manageable.
But don't forget to make sure that you bake into that plan a little bit of time for reviewing your progress, reviewing your content, and reinforcing it. So, again, we come back to the practice exams. So maybe rather than attempting the entire exam, the platforms allow you to pick up a particular subject area, so a subset of that just focused on that one topic to confirm that your learning is is sticking.
But equally important, make sure you bake in some rest and some downtime. Don't just cram, cram, cram and and burn out. Okay? You need time for your brain to absorb this.
Okay? And that doesn't come with just staring at the screen or your notes or, you know, whichever way you want to to study. Sometimes you need to sort of step away and your brain has a ability to absorb information when you're not actively absorbing it. It's processing what you've learned that day.
Good night's sleep is fantastic for that because that's your I I I'm no biologist, but I think the key to you know, your your brain during those periods of rest, that's when it actually tries to catch up on itself a little bit. So do make sure that you include that rest and that downtime, in there. It works wonders.
But be flexible. Don't necessarily hold yourself to that target date if life gets in the way. Okay? We all have families or jobs or other responsibilities.
You know, whatever it is that that gets in the way, of of that, be flexible with it. You know, if, you know, something has happened, you know, maybe you've got a big project at work or there's a significant life event, move the date. You can actually move the exam date a reasonable amount of times with no charge. So, you know, don't be too hard on yourself.
You know, don't pile on that pressure. Adjust as you go along.
But keep yourself on track. It's a balancing act all of the time. Okay? You've got to hold yourself accountable for your exam, but you've got to be kind to yourself as well. And I think if you get that balance right, again, you're setting yourself up for greater success.
So let's get into the weeds now. Let's talk literally about the exam itself and the the strategy for tackling those questions.
The structure of the questions in most, if not all, Salesforce exams is such that if you really read the question carefully, you won't go down a false path. Now there might be little things in there just to capture your focus, not trick questions as such, but questions that encourage you to read carefully.
If you quickly skim read a question, you might not miss keyword like not or accept or most likely or probable. Okay. You want to make sure that you scan those questions carefully and don't end up going the opposite direction to what they ask. It it sounds silly, but I've seen people get caught out by this time and time again. And, you know, they say, which of these is not the right answer? And they pick the one that that is the right answer or vice versa.
Remember to keep an eye on the clock. The majority of the exams that I've done have been around about ninety minutes, give or take. Sometimes two hours, but that's a rarity. Okay. So do be kind of mindful of the time. Okay. But don't rush things and don't get stuck and bogged down in a particular question.
The exam platform as it stands today, and I would imagine this will carry over to the new platform when when we move across, it allows you to flag questions that you want to come back to later.
So if you get stuck on something, don't panic. If, you know, if you feel that you're not keeping the the pace to get through the exam, flag it, come back to it later because there'll be other questions that are much easier. You go, oh, yeah. That's obvious. Click. Done.
What I've also found with exams, in the Salesforce certifications as well is sometimes the quest the way that a question is worded on a later question or even the answer to that question actually helps out with an earlier question. Because what happens a lot of the time is being a multi choice exam, there's some obviously wrong answers. There's some probably wrong answers. And so by using that process of elimination, you can drill down to the first, you know, the correct answer. Once you've done that, think, oh, actually, because I've eliminated that in this question, I now know that that question like four questions ago where it was worded slightly differently, it can't be option a, c, and d, for example. So I now know which is the right answer. So again, I would encourage but flag the tough questions, come back to them later because something later on might help you to come back to that one.
Trust your instincts. So sometimes, that gut feel, that first instinct is often the right one. So try not to get into the habit too often of talking yourself out of the right answer. By all means, reflect, consider, reread the question, and be absolutely sure, but most of the time, your first choice because of the institute, because of the effort and the study you've put in is the right answer.
And, of course, the best advice I can give in any exam as you're going through it, keep calm and carry on. You've got this.
So if you wanna go beyond Salesforce certification, think about a specialism. Think about going in a a complimentary direction. So as an example, an obvious example for us, of course, would be Salesforce DevOps.
So looking at the tools, the deployment process, testing, CICD, all of those great things, DevOps is actually a great complimentary skill set to your day to day job. Being able to manage and deploy your changes effectively is almost as important as making the changes in the first place. And, of course, you know, we are here on a DevOps Launchpad, webinar.
So where you would learn those skills is DevOps Launchpad with our free courses. We have certifications and badges too, and that's gonna help you master those DevOps principles and boost a bit of confidence in delivering your Salesforce work from the conception phase of, okay, I've gathered the requirements all the way through to a user telling you what a fantastic job you've done with it.
So now it's time to, head on out and go and get certified. Hopefully, I've given you enough armor and weapons to tackle the exams. Hopefully, you have a clear idea of how to approach them, how to break up your time, and how to not panic.
Certifications are great. They're they can be fun, not stressful. It's a great feeling when you get that notification to say that you've passed your exam, but don't feel disheartened if you get a notification saying that you haven't quite made it this time. The keywords are this time. You know, we've all been there. We have an opportunity to focus on, okay, which areas were the areas that I need to go and work just that little bit harder on and come back fighting next time.
In the meantime, I'm going to wrap up me talking and allow folks to, get some questions in. Over to you, Amy.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Rob. We have had a ton of questions as I'm sure you can imagine.
I'm gonna kick off here with a question from Nasir who asks for someone who is an aspiring, application architect, and then a system architect. Yeah. What would be the cadence to each certification, and what would be a good order to take them?
Interesting.
So I'm I'm also trying to get my way through that path, although I I have slowed down a little with with with the change of my career.
The way I approached it was firstly, I I when I first started my certification journey, the the obvious exam to tackle was the admin exam. The associate exams didn't exist back then. But, you know, the the admin is not a prerequisite for that architect pyramid, but it sure as heck helps. Okay?
Because, again, coming back to what I was saying earlier about getting those fundamentals in, knowing the breadth of the platform before we get into the depth of the platform. So I started with that, then I did, well, it used to be called force dot com developer. It's now called platform developer one. The reason that I would suggest that one next is because that's a prerequisite for both sides of those tracks both the application architect and the system architect.
So once you've got that, you've kind of knocked it out for both.
After that, I would say pick the certifications along that that, architect pyramid, which I'm I'm sure, you know, is is gonna be familiar with if he's talking about those. Pick the ones that, you know, where they're a certification in an area you're most comfortable with. Okay? Because that will build your confidence.
It'll get you practiced in taking the architect exam. So for example, if you're really hot on sharing and visibility, go for that one. You know, if you are a data wizard, do the data architect exam. Just get that level of comfort, get that level of familiarity with the exams, but also just get that sense of accomplishment.
Okay? The more you do, the more you want to do. It's it's dangerously addictive.
But, yeah, that's probably the best advice I would say for for navigating those. And, yeah, I can completely relate to that, Nazir. I'm I'm I've I've got two more to go to get my system architect, and I've I've been putting them off for far too long.
Awesome. Yeah. No. Great advice, Rob. I've just popped a link in there as well, Nasir.
It's just to an excerpt in one of our recent blog posts, but on there, there's a link to, like, all the Salesforce certification pathways that might be useful, and there's a nice diagram there for you as well if you wanna check that out.
We probably have time for maybe one more question, maybe two.
So we've had lots of questions about changes to the, the way that Salesforce doing certifications.
Yeah.
Some of them are more asking what your opinion perhaps would be of some of those changes as I know we're we're unsure of the full extent of the changes.
I don't know if you know, Rob. If not, we can, find this out for you. This is another question from Nasir, actually, who asks, are there any changes in the format for someone who's already transferred all of their certifications into Trailheads?
I don't believe so. The messaging that I've seen, read, heard, etcetera so far is that, you know, your existing certifications are valid and safe.
I don't know specifically about certification maintenance. As we know, that went from being, well, depending on how long you've had your certifications, but, you know, some of us some of us, folks that have had them a while, it originally went from doing a whole other exam on web assessor, like a smaller cut down version, to just being a a Trailhead module, to to maintain our certifications.
I haven't heard that that part's gonna change. I think the majority of the changes around the new platform are just consolidating things. Certainly, you know, if, if any of you are Salesforce partners, you know, there are there's a whole other branch to the the learning tree called partner learning camp, and there's lots of sort of partner certifications and accreditations and things in there. And then there's, you know, all the different cloud platforms and things that Salesforce own.
It became a little bit fragmented, and over time, they've been bringing things across. I think this is much more of a streamline exercise in two ways. One is to get all of those certifications and and maintenances and and badges and everything together so that you can actually see your learning journey, not just here's my search, but here's the extent of everything that I've learned in, you know, on my on my Salesforce path. But also just streamlining that onboarding process of getting those exams, the process of, you know, signing in, making sure the room's nice and clean and that, you know, you haven't got your study materials hidden away.
You know, all of that. Again, got a little bit fragmented with different platforms. I think Salesforce are just making an effort. Plus, lots of people just complained about WebAssessor right now.
It's it's a very old platform with with old web technology. So not just a facelift, but also a technology thing, you know, where it's not working on my machine. It doesn't support Mac or whatever those issues might be. I think it's a great opportunity to iron some of those out as well.
Yeah. For sure. And again, I've popped a link to more information, on everything we know and have found on the new era for Salesforce certification. So hopefully, you'll get some even even more information there, Nasir.
And to anyone else who asked about the new certifications, we did have a few, questions on that. But that is all we have time for today, I'm afraid. If we didn't get around to answering your question today or if you think of a question right now or in five minutes time, feel free to reach out to us at team at dev ops launchpad dot com. Or you can reply to the email we'll be sending out tomorrow, which will also include a recording of today's session.
So keep an eye out for that as well in your inbox. And as Rob mentioned, if you aren't currently a DevOps Launchpad user, you can go check out all of our Salesforce specific DevOps courses and certifications, over on dev ops launchpad dot com. I've popped the link in the chat. There'll be links in tomorrow's email as well, so don't worry if you don't have time to click that now.
But you can sign up for free there. Go check out all of our courses.
But as I said, that is all we have time for today. So thanks so much everyone for joining. Once again, huge thank you to Rob for presenting today's session, answering all of your awesome questions. We hope you really found today's session super helpful and insightful, and we really hope to see you again soon in our next webinar. So thanks so much, everyone, and take care.
And good luck with those certs.
Indeed. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
Bye, everyone.
