One year ago, my Salesforce career was in a very different place.
I was working as a Senior Salesforce Administrator but held only one Salesforce certification. I knew I needed to earn more Salesforce certifications if I wanted my Salesforce career to continue growing at the same rate.
You cannot fast-track years of experience. A year is a year. There is no changing that.
I wanted to focus on what I could change, and I knew I could change the number of Salesforce certifications I held. So that is where I focused my time, energy, and money.
In March 2017, I attended Salesforce Destination Success, a week-long Salesforce training event that has recently been rolled into TrailheaDX.
The Friday prior to Salesforce Destination Success, I passed the Advanced Administrator and Platform App Builder certification exams. I passed three more exams during Salesforce Destination Success: Sales Cloud Consultant, Service Cloud Consultant, and Community Cloud Consultant. To say it was an eventful seven days is an understatement.
With that said, the effort was certainly worth it.
Less than one month after attending Salesforce Destination Success, I accepted a job offer to work for Simplus in April 2017, starting my new role in May 2017.
Five short months later, I jumped on an opportunity within Simplus to join our new training team and get certified to teach CPQ-201 and CPQ-211 for Salesforce. I also passed the CPQ Specialist exam, which was one of the most difficult Salesforce exams I have ever taken. I became a Salesforce Certified Instructor in the months that followed, getting certified to teach CPQ-201 in November 2017 and CPQ-211 in January 2018.
At 32, I was a Senior Salesforce Administrator, holding only one certification. By the time I turned 33, I was a 7x Salesforce Certified Professional, 2x Salesforce Certified Instructor, and Vetforce Coach. I had also been published on the Salesforce blog in October 2017 and quoted in CRM magazine in December 2017.
To be clear, I am not saying any of this to brag. Instead, I want to illustrate a point: you can do more than you think you can do.
If you would have told me that I was going to accomplish all of that in one year, I would have looked at you like you were crazy.
“There’s no way,” I would have said. Still, I found a way. You can, too. Pick your destination, determine your next step, then take that step. No one else can take that step for you.
What is your most audacious Salesforce career goal? What is the next step you could take to get there? Why haven’t you taken it yet?
Leave a comment and let me know! I read them all.
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