Salesforce.com has seen high revenue growth for the past few years. Revenue has increased from $8.4 billion in FY2017 to $13.3 billion in FY2019. It has seen an increase of 22.5% year-over-year. Every company has seen a considerable growth in their productivity and business that the career opportunities in the same have also increased.
But, what actually is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management(CRM) solution that brings companies and customers together. It is one integrated CRM platform that gives all your departments- including sales and services, commerce, marketing- a single shared view of every customer.
Using Salesforce you can do personalized marketing, knowing your customers, delivering the expected to the customers, automate time-consuming tasks by building custom applications.
It has made otherwise clumsy tasks easy that the companies can focus more on productivity and services than wasting time in managing customer data. And that is the reason Salesforce.com is ranked #1 CRM platform.
In this article, we shall explore different Salesforce certifications and one can pursue and how a training course, like Salesforce developer training, would benefit your career.
What are Salesforce Certifications?
Salesforce Certifications focus on various job roles or tracks common among Salesforce professionals. At present, Salesforce offers 23 credentials, most of which target consultants and architects. There are no tiers in the Salesforce Certification programs. The main positions are:
- Administrator
- Consultant
- App builders
- Developers
- Architect
- Specialists(implementation experts)
- Marketers
- Pardot experts.
If you wish to achieve a Certification in Salesforce, you need to pass an exam of 60 multiple-choice questions. The duration may vary from 90 to 120 minutes depending on the certification.
For most Salesforce Certifications there are no prerequisites, for others, prerequisites are simply other Salesforce Certifications.
Benefits of Salesforce Certification
Having a Salesforce Certification in your resume can be so helpful that it can let you land your dream job. Getting Salesforce certified is so flexible that you can get certified in just a few days or months. You can get one or more certifications, of course adding more certifications will increase your salary and designation. Moreover, by allowing you to become a subject matter expert, it increases your marketability in a tight IT job market.
When you have Salesforce skills, your job can pay you more than $70,000 per year to $100,00 depending on the certifications gained. There is an 8% increase in salary of Salesforce sales roles than that of other sales professionals.
Overview of Salesforce Certifications
Salesforce roles range from technical (architects, developers, implementation experts) to those related to marketing and sales. The depth of understanding of the Salesforce platform varies with the respective roles. There are individual certifications that demonstrate expertise in a given domain.
Let us see briefly what are the certifications and what needs to be learned.
Salesforce Administrator
Candidates should have a vast knowledge of Salesforce customization and configuration and they should have skills in managing users and getting the most out of the Salesforce platform, to earn this certification. You are given 90 minutes to solve an exam of 60 multiple-choice questions. If you really want to pass you should know how to manage users, data and security; maintain and customize Sales Cloud and Service Cloud applications; build reports, dashboards, and workflows. You need to pay a registration fee of $200 and $100 for a retake; and no prerequisites.
Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder
The credentials required for the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder are the ability to design, build and implement custom applications on the Force.com platform. More programming and engineering skills are required for this credential than any other track in Certified Administrator credential. The in-depth knowledge of customization functions and declarative development available on the platform is required to pass this exam. You need to answer 60 multiple choice questions in 90 minutes. You need to have a thorough knowledge of how to design a data model, user interface, and business logic; customize applications for mobile users, deploy custom applications and design reports and dashboards; to pass this exam.
You need to pay $200 as an exam fee and $100 for a retake.
Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I
The candidates must be familiar with the development life cycle and have a detailed knowledge of available platforms and environments. The candidates must be capable of designing the data model, user interfaces and business logic and security for custom applications and also be able to build custom applications using Apex and Visualforce.
The candidates need to pass an exam of 60 multiple choice questions to be solved in 105 minutes.
The registration fee is $200 and the retake is $100.
Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II
This certification exam has three components- a multiple-choice exam, a programming assignment, and an essay exam. So a candidate must be an expert in the programming of the Force.com platform and data modeling so they can develop business logic and interfaces on the platform. The exam includes 60 questions of multiple-choice format to be solved in 120 minutes. Candidates need to use Apex and Visualforce to create application components based on a set of preconfigured business logic in 30 days as a programming assignment. The essay exam has three questions related to the programming assignment that is to be completed in 60 minutes in a proctored environment.
Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Developer
The candidates must be well-versed in creating personalized and dynamic sales messages, landing pages, have sound knowledge of Marketing Cloud scripting languages, data configuration, data manipulation, advanced segmentation, and reporting analytics. Candidates are also required to have hands-on experience developing across the full Salesforce platform. Candidates will be given 105 minutes to complete an exam of 60 multiple-choice questions.
This also requires a registration fee of $200 and a retake requires $100.
Salesforce Training
Now that you know about different Salesforce certifications, you must decide which certification best suits your interests. Well, the next step then would be to go for a training course that will prepare you to pass any of the certifications of Salesforce with your ease and pace. While one can do self-study, taking up a training course is recommended as you will get the benefit of learning from industry experts. Many training providers also give practical knowledge by letting you work on a live Salesforce environment. So, start your career in Salesforce today!
