Remember Remember Your Salesforce Exam Maintenance: Some Quick Tips
If You Hold Salesforce Certs, Here’s Some Quick Tips on Maintaining
If you hold one or more Salesforce Certifications, one thing you will need to bear in mind is that you need to maintain them, otherwise you will lose the credential and potentially have to retake them again. This almost tripped me up this past Friday as we got a message sent in our work Slack reminding us that today was the final deadline to complete our maintenance modules. When I heard that I panicked a little and said to myself “crumbs, what exam/s do I have to maintain by the end of the day?” Fortunately, it turned out that I didn’t have to maintain any exams by the end of Friday. Nonetheless, it inspired me to write a quick blog to share some tips I’ve come up with to help you keep on top of your maintenance modules. Granted, none of this will be rocket science, but hopefully it will help me as my various deadlines approach. It might help you as well. You never really know do you?
If you have any tips yourself, please feel free to share them in the responses below or online via social media. We’re all in this together after aren’t we?
A Useful Caveat Before We Begin
Before I go over my quick tips for this, first let me highlight that this isn’t a post where I will tell you what exams you should or shouldn’t maintain. That isn’t my place or responsibility, I do have opinions on this topic, but that would be best left for either private conversations or another post entirely. This post is based on the assumption that you have already decided what exams you want to maintain, or you’ve simply just decided to maintain them all. The purpose of this post is to provide some tips for maintaining your credentials, not which credentials to maintain and which ones to let expire.
Tip #1: Check the Date for Your Deadline
The first tip I want to offer is to check the actual date your maintenance deadline is due. There’s a couple of ways you can do this, we’ll cover each one in a bit of detail, starting with the first one, the Maintenance Schedule page.
#1: Trailhead’s Certification Maintenance Schedule Help Page
The first and most common is to go to the Trailhead Certification Maintenance Schedule page and look to see where your exam is listed. On this page you will see a table showing the relevant release cycles, the date the maintenance modules will be available from, the deadline date and finally which exams are included in it.
This table only lists exams included for maintenance across the listed seasonal releases. At the time of writing, the listed seasonal releases are Spring ’21, Summer ’21 and Winter ’22. Expect Spring ’22 and Summer ’22 at a later date.
However, below this section near the bottom of the page you will find an accordion listing of credentials that you can toggle on and off to see other exams not listed in the table. I understand if that sounds a little confusing.
Here is the list of categories shown in the Maintenance Schedule page:
- Administrator Credentials
- Architect Credentials
- Consultant Credentials
- Developer Credentials
- Marketer Credentials
Notably absence in the list of certifications on this page is the User Experience Designer certification exam that launched last year. There may be on the list, but in full transparency I looked for my certifications first and foremost. I’d be interested to see if there are any other credentials missing from this page.
That takes me to the second method, and honestly this is the one I prefer.
#2: The Credential Component in Your Trailblazer.me Profile
The second way you can check the deadline date for your maintenance modules is go to your Trailblazer.me profile and look at the exams listed in your certifications component. Out of the two methods this is the one I prefer, the reason for my preference will be evident in the screenshots shown below, however this component is linked to your Webassessor account so it pulls the exact maintenance dates for your exam based on the maintenance cycle and when you passed your exam. So it appears to be a much more accurate view of when your maintenance modules are due for completion.
Before I show off this component via a screenshot, I do want to highlight the fact that the component has two different views. A public and a private one.
The Public View
The public view is very simple, it is just a list of your certifications listed in order of completion from oldest to newest (that’s the view I see so I assume that’s what it is, rather than something else). It lists the dates in which the credentials were valid from, along with a brief description of the exam. This view does not display any kind of notice about maintenance being due. The notices about upcoming maintenance is hidden behind your login profile. This could be seen as a good thing to many people, as it means people cannot see when you need to complete maintenance modules by. For me, I don’t mind people knowing necessarily when my maintenance modules are due, but I don’t think it should be public knowledge either. It’s a fine line in my mind.
The Private View
This second view is one that can only be seen by yourself. In this view what you see is a list of your exams, where the exams due for maintenance get placed at the top of the list. The exams that aren’t due for maintenance appear to be listed in order of completion in the same as is shown in the public view.
Now I only have one credential which is due for maintenance, that being Platform App Builder which has a December 2022 deadline. That means I only have one exam listed for maintenance as my Admin and UX Designer certs aren’t due for maintenance yet. I assume that if you have more than one credential due for maintenance that those will be placed at the top of your Certifications component, listed in ascending deadline date order.
You also get a couple of extra things in your private view which are very helpful. The first of these is a flag to let you know the status of the exam, the status will either be Active, Maintenance Due, Expiring Soon, Expired, or Retired (descriptions of these can be found on the Verify Your Certification Status help article on Trailhead). The second very helpful feature in this section is a little reminder message shown underneath the description of the certification where you see a reminder to complete the maintenance module. This message includes the name of the module you need to complete (hyperlinked to the module as well), and the date that your maintenance module is due by.
Now that we know when and where we can find the maintenance module due dates, let’s now take a bit of a dive into actually planning to complete them.
Tip #2: Add Your Deadline Date to a Calendar
This tip is very simple, but also very important I feel. See if you’re anything like me, it is quite possible that if you don’t have something in your diary that you might forget about it. Honestly, I used to be really good at just keeping all of my deadlines and appointments in my head, but over the years as I’ve began to do more and rely on technology more, I’ve lost that a little bit, funny how that works. So, my tip here is to add your maintenance module deadline to your calendar. I’ll admit that there is one potential challenge with this tip, that being which calendar do I stick it in, after all we probably all have at least five different calendars that we’re managing our schedules from don’t we?
How you do this is entirely up to you, it is not really my place to tell you how to handle this yourself. I can however provide some pointers which might help you decide how best to proceed with deciding when and how to do this task.
In my mind, it boils down to answering three key questions:
- Do I want to maintain this credential?
- When is the maintenance module deadline?
- When do I want to complete the maintenance module?
This tip will directly link to my third and final tip, but before we get into that let me briefly explain what I’m doing right now (FYI, this might change). What I’m doing right now is two things, the first thing is I’m adding a task to my calendar via Google Tasks for the date the maintenance module is due. To me it doesn’t matter for this item when I want to complete it by, the deadline date is what I want to add in my calendar. The second thing I’ll do is decide when I want to complete the maintenance module by, and then add into my Google calendar as a reminder. Once I have completed the module, I’ll mark both the reminder and the task as completed in order to ensure I don’t get those reminders. If you like you could easily set up multiple reminders to send you a number of reminders to complete this. This is what I’m doing right now.
What I aim to do in the future is a little different. See, in one of my dev orgs I have a Credential Tracking app that I have been gradually building. Right now this app only includes the attempts I have taken at exams, and the results (yes, this app does include my very own score calculator). What I want to do within this app is to create a custom object for maintenance modules where the link for the module can be added in as well as the deadline date, a target date and maybe some other fields that can be used to configure how to handle sending reminders to complete the module. My aim is to build a Flow to handle this in which reminders will only be sent if the maintenance module hasn’t been completed. This is still a work in progress, as is the app overall, it might be something I look at packaging out a little further down the line, but I’m not quite there yet. So ultimately, my aim is to put this in Salesforce and let Salesforce do the leg work in handling the reminders for maintenance modules. This app has been a bit of a hobby project, hence it being a little slow to get completed. It’s something I want to finish, but I do have other priorities.
Tip #3: Don’t Leave It To The Last Minute
My final tip will come across as somewhat hypocritical maybe, as I haven’t completed my maintenance module yet. However, my last tip is don’t leave it to the last minute. Find a time that works for you to complete the module by, where possible consider other credentials you need to maintain, add it to your schedule, block out some time to complete it and then complete it. For me, it will probably be July when I block out that time. So I know approximately when I would look to complete it by. Being transparent, the reason for a July date is because I’ll be taking Advanced Admin at the end of April and Nonprofit Cloud Consultant at the beginning of July. So I already have a couple of exams that I am working towards, plus I will be speaking at two conferences across May and June and am submitting ideas for talks at another couple of events in June … so May and June are going to be busy months.
Granted, I know that the maintenance modules probably won’t take too long, but I do also have to consider other things in my diary such as work, other community commitments, church and family. So really, July makes sense as it is well ahead of the deadline, and it gives me plenty of time for everything else that I’m doing right now. This is the main point I want to convey, try to find a balance between not leaving it to the last minute to avoid losing a credential you want to keep, and doing it at the expense of other important commitments. Find a time that works for you, but still gives time to actually do it. Hopefully all of that waffling on makes some sense.
Closing Remarks
So that’s my quick fire tips for keeping up with your maintenance modules. Like I said at the beginning, these are probably nothing groundbreaking. It’s essentially get your due date, add it to your diary and actually do it. However, I thought it was a good topic to cover in brief as it is a topic that was relevant over the last few days. If you have your own tips, please do feel free to share them in the responses below or in the comments on social media. I’d love to hear from you, as would the rest of the Trailblazer Community I’m sure.
