3 Salesforce Certifications in 6 months..why? how?

So, I have been working in a techno-functional role involving Salesforce CRM since the last 2 years or so. I have worked on a wide range of projects involving case management, APIs, ETL solutions and most of service & sales cloud. Although this has helped me to explore some of the many great features of this cloud based CRM, there are many areas I need to cover and learn about.

To give my Salesforce career a boost and gain a spot in the world-wide community of its users, I decided to take the Platform app builder last year in August. This was my first certification exam, and had no prior knowledge or experience with regards to the preparation strategy, exam format, and study guides. Well to my misfortune, I flunked it. This was one of the new exams which Salesforce had released in 2015. Being new to Salesforce, I did not have the Dev401 certification and hence, I wasn’t eligible for the app builder review exam. I had to take the full 60 questions test!
Even though, I wasn’t successful in my first attempt, this exam helped me a lot to learn a lot about Lightning experience and Salesforce1 as I had no prior experience using these tools. Moreover, it was a great way to connect and network with other Salesforce certified professionals and learn how they cracked this one. I took this exam again this year and successfully cleared it.

My next certification was the admin one. The way I studied for it and cleared it was quite funny! So back in January, my manager had proposed me for a Service Cloud Certification course with Salesforce. Now as you know, the pre-requisite for this course is to have an Admin certification, which I didn’t. I had the necessary experience working on Salesforce admin tasks but wasn’t too confident about taking the exam as it covers almost everything in Salesforce, name it Sales, Service, Marketing, Analytics and so on. The good thing was, there were a lot of study material available online and a lot of great tips from many bloggers and MVPs. The funny part was, I just had 2 days to study for it and clear it as the Service cloud training was due to start soon. One website that helped me a lot in my short and quick preparation is CertifiedOnDemand. The course material is up-to-date and not very expensive. Again this is not dumps but actual study guide to help you read, practice, learn and understand Salesforce administration :) With the help of this and a few other resources and ofcourse, my experience, I cleared the administration exam in my first attempt.

Following this, I attended the Service Cloud Consultant training course with Salesforce in London. The course was inclined towards Service Cloud features of Salesforce, call center terminologies & strategies and basics of implementing a contact center. True to its name, the certification is to test your Service strategy consulting knowledge and is not just limited to the Salesforce domain . My experience working on cases, SLAs and entitlements helped me a lot to clear the exam in my first attempt. Not to forget the training provided by Salesforce!

Why should you get certified?

• Salesforce provides free Trailheads to learn the platform which makes the training process easy and flexible.
• In my opinion, Salesforce as a platform has a lot of features and tools, which probably I wouldn’t use unless my clients has its requirement. The best way to learn and explore them is to study and read about them, maybe through trailheads or blogs and practice them on your dev org. Preparing for certifications is a good reason and way to achieve this.
• On a personal level, certifications give you a sense of confidence when it comes to explaining/convincing your clients or peers regarding a particular Salesforce feature.