Trailmixes: Your Personal Learning Playlists for Trailhead
Just as the Trailhead editorial team maps out guided learning paths in the form of trails, you, our Trailblazers, have the ability to pick and match any order of trails, modules, projects, and superbadges to save in your very own trailmix.
I’ll never forget the first time I made a mixtape. Yes, I’m totally dating myself. Today, it’s Spotify playlists. But back in the day, it was more analog than that. The tape had all my favorites of the time and, in picking those songs and putting them in the order I wanted, I was able to express my creativity around my preferred type of music.
And by sharing that mixtape with my friends, my girlfriend, and even the kid down the street, I gave them insight into who I was, what I liked, and what was important to me.
It wasn’t that the record company didn’t have Grammy-winning producers who couldn’t create the right mind-altering moods by combining songs on an album. They got the ball rolling for me to take over every time. I took it from there to create something new that I could share with my world.
With Trailhead, you can experience that same sensation when you create your own trailmix.
Owned by you
Unlike trails which Salesforce manages, trailmixes are owned by you. You can create it, share it, throw it away, report on it, or even assign it to people within your organization. You control the destiny of a trailmix and how it’s used.
Also, unlike trails, a trailmix must be ‘followed’ so that we know that you want to complete it. It’s like adding a music playlist to your library — from that point on, it’s yours.
Why create a trailmix?
There are loads of reasons why you might create a trailmix. We had a large meeting at Salesforce where all of the executives around the company got together to discuss ideas and plan for the next year.
Before the meeting, a trailmix was created for everyone to complete, but the first 100 people to complete it won a beach towel.
Competing for a prize with a trailmix is a great way to have fun while you build adoption. You can create a trailmix that has any combination of Trailhead content, which makes it fun to learn while offering prizes to motivate everyone.
My first trailmix
I also remember when my friend, Cindi, wanted to explore a career in the Salesforce ecosystem. After talking with her on the phone for half an hour, I threw together a trailmix to help guide her on her journey.
And as you ramp up your users, admins, and developers, you can create custom trailmixes that make up the specifics of how your organization uses Salesforce. Rolling out Lightning? Trying out AppExchange for the first time? Doing both? Create a trailmix for it!
Discovering trailmixes
If you’re not sure what your first trailmix should be, don’t worry — discovering trailmixes is easy. There are great examples on Trailhead already.
You’ll find awesome trailmixes to follow under the Trailmixes tab like Get started with Trailhead or the Spring ’18 Release Readiness trailmix that introduces you to the latest and greatest features that were released at that time.
Jessica Murphy’s Becoming an Admin trailmix
When discovering trailmixes, the creator is key. Every trailmix lists its creator, which means you can explore trailmixes created by your favorite Salesforce employees, MVPs, or other community rockstars to follow in their footsteps.
Take Jessica Murphy. We all know she’s awesome, right? Plus, she really knows her stuff, so you know a trailmix from her is going to be golden. By sharing her Becoming an Admin: Big-Picture Thinkers Edition trailmix, Jessica also shares her own unique perspective for other Trailblazers to follow.
Following someone’s trailmix means following a path laid out for you by people from all walks of life to help you find the best way forward.
Create it
Discovering trailmixes is great, but what happens when you want to make your own trailmix? That’s easy! Just click the big blue button that says, ‘Create a trailmix,’ under the Trailmixes tab.
When creating a trailmix, all you need is a name and a description. This helps brand your trailmix. Try something fun like, ‘Getting badgy at a badge-a-thon,’ to help support the adoption of Lightning at your company!
Notice that URL or browser address? It has some important information. Not only is your Trailhead user ID included but also the name of your trailmix. This means that your trailmix is always unique to you, even if someone else creates a trailmix called ‘Getting badgy at a badge-a-thon.’
When you create a new trailmix, you can either choose to add content from any of the suggestions at the bottom of the page or click the ‘+’ button to add a new trail, module, project, or superbadge to your mix.
In this example, we’re creating a trailmix to support the rollout of Lightning to our end users. So we want to add content to our new trailmix (like CRM for Lightning Experience) by clicking the ‘+’ button on the module tile.
We can also add this same content to a brand new trailmix on the fly by simply selecting ‘Add to new trailmix.’
Share it
Every trailmix starts out private, meaning only the creator can see it. This way, you can create a trailmix for yourself made up of modules that you want to do at some point in the future — kind of like making your personal playlist.
However, trailmixes may also be shared publicly with the world (just as some mixtapes are meant to be shared with your friends). It’s a social affair.
When sharing, you can change the visibility from just you (private) to everyone (public). There’s an easy sharing link that you can copy or shout out on social networks like Chatter, Facebook, and Twitter.
But keep in mind that you’re building your personal brand on Trailhead, and in order to share that trailmix, your profile must also be public. Otherwise, fellow Trailblazers won’t know who created it.
Follow it
Now, when a user in your org pastes that trailmix link in their browser, they can choose whether to follow it. If they do, it will then be trackable in their in-progress section under the trailmixes tab and, when finished, it will be trackable as completed.
Pro tip: If you don’t follow a trailmix, it won’t be trackable! So make sure your users follow important trailmixes.
When trailmixes are followed by users, they’ll show up in Trail Tracker. If you haven’t heard of Trail Tracker, it’s an awesome, fun, and free app that you can download from the AppExchange.
It helps you see exactly where people are in their Trailhead learning journeys, guides them toward the best paths, and gives them an incentive for learning even more (but more on that in another post coming soon).
Assign and report on it
In addition to reporting on trailmixes, you can also assign trailmixes to users within your org. All you need to do is mass assign (or unassign!) users from the trailmix record in Trail Tracker.
And when the user logs in to Trailhead, they’ll see it on their home page and under their Trailmixes tab with clear color coding when it’s due.
Get (trail)mixing!
So there you have it. Trailmixes really are like your very own mixtape (or playlist!) of Trailhead content. Mix and match modules, trails, projects, or superbadges for your personal use or to share with anyone else in your organizational “neighborhood.”
And together with Trail Tracker, trailmixes can even allow you to build enablement around Trailhead content through reporting and assignments (for more on driving adoption, check out the awesome Get your company started with Trailhead trailmix).
Now’s your chance to create your own trailmix and share it on your favorite social network. Get mixing, get sharing, then shout out about your awesome trailmix on social!
