How Do You Expand the Salesforce Ecosystem? Start in the Classroom
I was fortunate to start my career at Salesforce right out of college. Looking back, I feel lucky to have stumbled across Salesforce during a business school case study in 2013 where, at the time, Salesforce was growing 35 percent year over year and was the #1 CRM company in the industry. Today, the Salesforce Economy is set to create 4.2 million jobs by 2025. Now, more than ever, students have an incredible opportunity to build a career with Salesforce, raising the demand for educators to teach software skills and place new grads into the ecosystem.
Read on for a success story that I hope gives inspiration on how you can connect with colleges and universities in your network. If you’re interested in engaging, be sure to check out Trailhead for Partners for more information on expanding Salesforce talent. And stay tuned for our next spotlight in this series, where we talk about a Salesforce consulting course at the University of Buffalo that’s not only using Salesforce to make an impact in student lives, but also in their community.
It’s a unique time in our industry, where demand outpaces the supply, with a majority being admin, developer, and consultant jobs. This is particularly felt among Salesforce partners as they look to grow their Salesforce practices. With growing demands, employers have begun taking university engagement to new heights by bringing Salesforce to the classroom and connecting those skills to real-life experience. I’ve had the pleasure to hear from Salesforce partner employers and educators to learn about their successes in Salesforce education, and ultimately, placement into the ecosystem.
Today, we spotlight an incredible partnership between the University of Montana and Advanced Technology Group (ATG), a Cognizant company. This story shows how employers are building Salesforce education in the classroom.
Sonia Flamm, a Salesforce Practice Director at ATG, shares more about this program below.
Snapshot of the Program & Partnership
Sonia: For over four years, ATG has partnered with the University of Montana (UM) College of Business to help students develop foundational knowledge around Salesforce, consulting, and business principles that will best prepare them for their careers following graduation. The Business Management Information Systems course (BMIS) was formed as the first of many collaborative efforts and is built on three core pillars. The first two pillars are free, online-learning platforms: ATG University and Salesforce Trailhead. The third pillar is an introduction to the real-life use case surrounding the people, processes, and technologies that a new graduate will encounter as they enter the workforce, regardless of industry or profession.
How did the program get formed?
Sonia: The program started with a collaboration between an UM alumnus working for ATG and a BMIS faculty member. The idea was to strategically align local business needs, relevant curriculum, and academic rigor. After preliminary planning meetings, a project was set in motion to identify and formulate content that would be used as the core material taught in Management Information Systems classes in the Spring of 2016. The positive feedback from students and renewed dedication from ATG led to the College of Business establishing the course as a permanent offering.
Shortly after Cognizant acquired ATG in September 2018, they recognized ATG’s unique model of recruiting people with non-traditional backgrounds, rapidly and effectively reskilling them into adept technology consultants. They saw massive potential in scaling that model, and ATG’s strong partnership with the University of Montana (through efforts like BMIS) provided a foundation to build on. ATG has recruited over 100 UM students with diverse backgrounds ranging from theater arts to life sciences. These outcomes were possible because of the intersection of multiple factors — ATG’s recruitment and training model, the talent pool in Missoula, ATG’s partnership with UM focused on workforce development, and Cognizant’s enablement.
The amazing results have provided course expansion opportunities where ATG now has two programs with UM:
- BMIS Course: The first UM class teaching Salesforce within the College of Business
- “All-In-Missoula” (AIM): 12-week technology consultant trainee program
What are some of the challenges you faced?
Sonia: A few challenges that BMIS faces is managing real-world expectation settings versus classroom expectation settings. Additionally, the evolution of Salesforce technology maintains a focus area to ensure there’s continued development on new learning, which Trailhead is utilized to solve for. Through the collaboration between ATG and UM’s BMIS program, we were able to tune the class to meet all the stakeholder’s needs.
Within All-In-Missoula (AIM), a technology education bootcamp, the curriculum encompasses a large amount of information in a short period of time. One challenge that we continually face is ensuring that our curriculum prepares students for the technology careers that they will start after three short months. We continuously make changes to our curriculum to meet ever-changing business demands.
What are the results you’ve seen?
Sonia: With BMIS, students have extended knowledge of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) processes and challenges, as well as a new understanding of business applications used to solve typical business challenges. Additionally, students have increased visibility into the Salesforce platform as an application to solve these challenges, resulting in learners that are more prepared to hit the ground running in a competitive landscape — which means decreased wait time to billable consultants.
Through AIM, to date, we have created 53 new jobs in Missoula, Montana. AIM also helps meet the continuous demand for Salesforce consultants within ATG Cognizant. Most of the graduates of the AIM training program come from non-traditional fields, such as education, retail service, construction, and health care. AIM provides a tremendous opportunity for people to reskill and then directly use those skills to obtain a rewarding career. It also allows people to stay and live in Missoula, Montana.
What’s next for the program?
Sonia: We will continue to collaborate with the UM College of Business and the BMIS faculty to deliver relevant curriculum within the BMIS course. Each year, we meet to discuss ways to improve the partnership and refresh the content that we deliver to students. Our goal is to ensure students are learning the latest Salesforce features, consulting practices, and business principles. For AIM, ATG Cognizant is focused on growth of the program, both in Montana and potentially through future partnerships with other Universities.
ATG and the University of Montana is a successful partnership example of how to be innovative in a growing technological space.
Get started today!
- If you’re an educator or Salesforce partner looking to learn about how to expand new Salesforce talent, check out Trailhead for Partners for more.
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