My Approach to Trailhead!!!
What is My Personal Approach to Learning on Trailhead?
Trailhead is an important part in the career development of any Salesforce professional, it’s the first place any Trailblazer should go for further learning and skills development. While it is true that there are other resources out there which are great for this … Trailhead should be the first place we go.
The other a day I tweeted out that I had just gotten to 390 badges and was hoping to get to 400 very soon. This is actually a pretty big milestone for me as this time last year I had completed less than 50 badges. Yes, you heard that right, over the course of this year I’ve actually completed around 280 badges, including a total of 7 Superbadges. Needless to say, it’s been a lot of hard work over the course of this year working towards completing so many badges overall.
After posting this Tweet, I got a response asking me why I go for the badges that I complete. So that’s the question I want to try and answer in today’s post. In one sense I can maybe see reasons for it being perceived that I might be doing a bit of “badge collecting”. The reality however is that I’m not doing that. While I have completed a LOT of badges in a short period of time, it does make sense to talk about my overall experiences this year. After all prior to 30 December 2020, I wasn’t a Ranger at all, nor was I certified. And by the end of 2021 it is entirely possible that I’ll be a 4x Ranger and 3x certified.
I’ll talk about my certification journey most likely at the end of the year, after all I haven’t sat all of the cert exams I’m going to do this year. I’m actually thinking of doing a series of blogs at the end of 2021 that reflect on this year and the things I’ve done, including the certs.
So with all of that preamble, let’s begin by talking about why I’ve completed so many badges on Trailhead this year. First, a little bit of context.
The Context Behind the Work
Let’s go back to around November 2020. I’d been working from home since March of the same year, and like many others in various workplaces, things were happening that led me to think about the question, “do I want to stay here?” Now in full transparency, the Nonprofit I work for is great in many ways. However, over recent years my role has been misunderstood, mismanaged, underpaid and given far too little time to actually do the job.
On top of this there has been a lack of opportunities to grow and develop in my role. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the training I’ve done in my role has predominantly been targeted for an audience which I just don’t fit into. Most of the training I have done at work has either been irrelevant, or has been targeted much lower than the level of training I should have. With this particular point in mind, I decided that if I truly wanted to progress in my career, then I had to put the work in myself. Unfortunately my organisation, as good as it is most of the time, just wasn’t ever going to do that, or at least not in a way that would be appropriate to my role. Work was never going to allow me to work towards getting Salesforce certifications, nor would they allow me to do higher level training that would not only prove beneficial to me as a professional, but to the organisation as well. So, I decided to take my professional skills development into my own hands, essentially, I decided to begin to put me first.
This decision first started by working through badges on Trailhead. Initially I began by working through some of the non hands-on-challenge badges that I found interesting and could do on the TrailheadGo app, alongside doing badges that I should have done years ago but never got around to doing. This initial combination helped me to get to Ranger status for the first time. After that I took part in the 100DaysofTrailhead challenge, while doing this I achieved Ranger status another two times by the end of March. Taking part in the campaign, however, also pushed me to start thinking about my approach to learning on Trailhead … after all my initial trick of doing smaller badges on the mobile app and completing the badges that I should have already done could only last so long, I needed a sustainable pattern for what badges to do, when to do them and how to do them. So let’s get into that model a little bit.
My Approach to Completing Badges on Trailhead
OK, so let me say right off the bat, this is my personal approach. It doesn’t have to be your model, but it works for me, so for now I’m OK with it. This model may eventually change, right now I’m not in a workplace that values things like Salesforce certs or assigns me learning on Trailhead, so at the moment anything I do on is completely on my own back, just like the certs.
Currently my approach to Trailhead is based in four questions:
- Is it something that I think will help me in my current role?
- Is it something tied to a certification I’m studying for?
- Is it something that I simply just want to learn?
- Is it tied to a quest? … Yes, it is completely OK to do badges for Quests.
These are the four questions I ask before I decide to go out to do a badge or a collection of badges on Trailhead. Notice how the majority of questions are about skills development. Obviously the quest badges do provide for good learning opportunities, but when I do a quest I do it because I want to do the actual quest. Let’s now look at each question in a little more detail.
1: Is It Something That I Think Will Help Me in My Current Role?
The thing with all of these questions is that they are relatively easy to answer. As I’ve already mentioned, Trailhead should be the first place that a Salesforce professional goes to for any learning related to Salesforce. So in this particular case, you would be going to Trailhead to learn something when you are trying to do it in your role, are about to do something relating to it, or are simply just trying to be prepared for future work you might do.
For me the best example of this would be the badges I’ve done on Flow. In the Nonprofit sector I’ve observed a lot of hesitancy around learning Flow, however, for me personally, from the first time I saw it in action I wanted to learn it as I could see a number of use cases where Flow would greatly improve the work that we do when doing record creation. With that in mind, I decided to complete all of the badges I could find on Flow in order to learn as much as possible about it. Now, after completing the badges on Trailhead on it, doing lots of practice in Dev Orgs and working on implementing it into our org, Flow has actually become my favourite automation tool in Salesforce.
One point I will raise for this question is that if you stretch the definition of the word relevant, then every single badge on Trailhead can be relevant to what you do. This is because pretty much every single badge you do on Trailhead will have some gem in it somewhere that you can take and adapt to fit your current working context. With that in mind, my honest view is that this question is based around what you’re actually doing for work, and the badges that you do on Trailhead in this regard is for learning about things you’re doing in your job or things that you want to implement into your work.
2: Is It Something Tied to a Certification I’m Studying For?
If you’re preparing for any Salesforce Certification, you’ll find that there is a Trailmix for it on Trailhead. These are always worth completing as you revise for your exam. Lots of people in the community go to FocusonForce for their revision, and that is absolutely fine, FocusonForce is a really great resource. However, not every exam is covered on FocusonForce, for example there are no study guides or practice exam questions for Nonprofit Cloud Consultant (among others). So you might find that there isn’t content out there for some certs except what is available on Trailhead. So in some instances, Trailhead is the only source material you will have for the exam you’re studying for.
So, if you’re studying for a certification exam, start with the Trail or Trailmix for the exam that Salesforce officially put out. From there progress onto other content that’s available from the likes of Salesforce, FocusonForce, Salesforce Ben and any other resources that are available for the exam. This question is probably one of the most obvious ones in terms of answering it. Take as an example studying for the Platform App Builder, then completing the Trailmix that is focused on what you need to know for the exam makes perfect sense. Basically this question is simply just a case of completing the badges that come into the exam prep Trails and Trailmixes for whatever cert you’re working on.
3: Is It Something That I Simply Just Want To Learn?
These last two points are a bit more of a free-for-all in all honesty. Let’s start with asking the question of whether or not it’s something you simply want to learn. Here the Trailblazer would be free to essentially do any badge they want. Interested in learning Heroku, great, go do the badges. Want to know about the relationship between Slack and Salesforce, go for it!!! Here, the world is your oyster, here you’re free to do any badge on a Salesforce related topic you want to learn more about. This is purely for your own development.
I can give a good example of a series of badges I did here that fall into this category. Earlier this year I created a Trailmix including all of the badges relating to NPSP. We don’t use NPSP in the organisation I work for, so my experience with NPSP is very limited. However, as a Nonprofit Salesforce Admin who’s quite active in the community, I find myself getting asked more and more questions about NPSP. So instead of simply replying with “NPSP isn’t something I use, so I don’t know”, I decided to go out and learn more about NPSP. So while I wouldn’t say I have a “working” knowledge of NPSP, I do feel like I can confidently say that I know enough about it to be able to answer questions I get asked about NPSP going forward. Obviously, with the caveat of I don’t use it on a day-to-day basis, so there’s probably going to be better answers out there than what I can offer.
This is actually quite a fun question to ask, and work on. For example, I think it would be a cool idea to learn Heroku to see if I can create my own version of the Salesforce4All tool with it being retired later this year. This tool isn’t tied to my job at all, but it is something that could potentially be really helpful for members in the community, plus Heroku looks really fun. So while it’s not at the top of my priority list right now, it is something I’m hoping to have a go at and learn more about. Earlier this year I also tried my hand out at building Lightning Web Components by working through badges on the topic on Trailhead, so that’s something I might go back to along with doing more badges on other skills like Apex. There’s quite a few things I want to try out.
4: Is It Tied to a Quest?
And finally, we arrive at Trailhead Quests. In the community, we all love swag don’t we? I do as well. In fact most of the time I find myself wearing Salesforce swag, whether that’s a T-Shirt, a Hoodie, or even a Christmas jumper … yes I do own the Codey Christmas jumper. Trailhead Quests provide a great way to combine learning and winning swag (maybe even certification vouchers). So, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with completing quests. Quests can serve as a fun and engaging way to learn more about the upcoming seasonal release, a new certification, or even a new Salesforce acquisition (like Slack). I’ve actually won a prize on two occasions by completing a Quest, one of those prizes being a certification voucher. Quests can also lead to some interesting and fun discussions in the community, along with piquing your interest in doing further learning on the topic related to the Quest you completed.
An example of this is how completing the Slack Quest Trailmix led to me wanting to learn more about Slack at a higher level. I’ve actually been using Slack since around 2016, and while I can manage Slack quite well, I thought it would be good to go down that road a little further and learn more about being a Slack Admin and to even potentially consider registering to take the Slack Administrator exam and try and get a certified in it as an Admin. This idea was also partially born out of a conversation with another Admin I know who shared the link to me about Slack certifications after we talked about Slack. So this thought came into my head through a combination of engaging with the community and by completing the Trailhead Quest on the topic.
Closing Remarks
So that is how I decide what Trailhead badges to do. I guess this approach would possibly change slightly if I moved on from my current role and began working for an organisation that prioritises learning via Trailhead. However, right now in my current role, I’m the one who is taking the lead on my own professional development, so I need to have an approach that works for me both in my current role and with any plans I have for career progression.
I’m not saying this approach is the right one, but like I’ve said, it does work for me right now. So depending on where you find yourself in your career, this approach may also work for you. Maybe it’s an approach that you can add to your current approach. If you’re in an organisation that assigns you badges to learn, then the approach I use, should you decide to implement it, would fit alongside the badges you’ve already been assigned by your organisation.
But what do you think? Do you think this approach sounds OK? What approach do you use when it comes to deciding what badges to complete? Let’s have a conversation on this post or on social media. I’d love to hear about how you prioritise what badges to do on Trailhead, and when to do them.
Special thanks to Emily Hicks-Rotella for the inspiration for this post.
