Written By Bill Powell: CSS Tec, Senior Salesforce Solutions Engineer
If you’re working in the Salesforce ecosystem and haven’t heard of Salesforce Trailhead by now, there is no better time to get involved. Welcome to our #Ohana…keep reading, you’re about to learn about the best learning platform in business (seriously).
“I love being a part of this ecosystem because it truly focused on inclusion, and making everyone better at what they do. I get excited when one of my team members tells me they learned about some cool new feature on Trailhead and how it will help our clients” says Chuck George, Salesforce Managing Director, CSS Tec, a Contemporary Staffing Solutions company.
In short, Trailhead is a free learning platform where you can follow preset learning “trails” that include individual learning modules and projects that are geared toward Salesforce admins, developers, or individual business users with difficulty ranging from basic to advanced and earn some cool badges. The best part is, Trailhead also contains modules that are not Salesforce platform related that focus on business strategy, equality, ethics, and public speaking. Check out one of the new modules Equality Ally Strategies, it’s fantastic!
So now that you know what Salesforce Trailhead is, or if you already knew what it was – what’s your personal strategy?
When I first started with Trailhead, I wanted all the badges. I started with the admin basic, intermediate, and advanced trails and then got lost from there and took every module that at the time looked helpful. I wanted as many badges as possible and took nearly every module and trail I had time for (and several times passed out at my computer at night). While the fire hose effect helped expose me to a lot of Salesforce features and terms early on, my retention suffered because it was so much to process at once, and worst of all, I suffered some major Trailhead burnout.
After regrouping, I setup a personal strategy for Trailhead, and it was simply this:
Focus On Today
Although it sounds basic, for the more advanced platform focused trailhead content, I created a personal strategy to only focus on what was relevant TODAY. Simply meaning, what am I doing today in my job that Trailhead can enhance? My formulas were a bit weak, so I revisited the formula modules. When I needed to do more automation I revisited those, and so on.
When I felt like I had maxed out on those modules, I set up time to speak with stakeholders at my company to get clarity on our future vision with Salesforce. Based on those results, I changed my Trailhead strategy to a “future” strategy, focusing on modules and trails based on functionality for future projects. I took modules focusing on IoT, mobile, and custom development (I’m still working on this one). Even though I was doing the “searching” for modules, I had a sound strategy and wasn’t clicking aimlessly.
In closing, dear admin, before you dive into the deep end with Trailhead and try to earn ALL THE BADGES, take a breath and set your own personal goals for what you want to accomplish. You could easily jump your Trailblazer rank from Scout to Ranger in no time flat, but what do you really gain from it?
By following the above steps you will be able to simultaneously get the most out of Trailhead, while obtaining the company vision and advancing your career.
“In marketing, trends and technologies are moving at a rapid pace. If you are not keeping up, you are left behind. Salesforce offers so many great tools to elevate your marketing strategy and trailheads are a great way to keep up your skills and how to apply them to your marketing strategy,” says Amy Green, Director of Marketing, ZynBit.
If you have any questions reach out our CSS Tec Salesforce team.