Most of us did not start our careers in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Some of us began Salesforce careers as a natural outflow of an existing software career, perhaps majoring in computer science, as well. Others entered the Salesforce ecosystem from a different—often wildly different—industry.
For example, I majored in music performance, served 12 years in the Army Reserve as a trombone player, and spent the bulk of my twenties working restaurant and retail jobs. I do not have a formal education in business or technology.
Based on my “credentials” and “experience,” I am not qualified to be a Solution Architect at Salesforce. Yet here I am, a Solution Architect at Salesforce.
How did I get here?
While many factors contributed to the growth of my Salesforce career, one skill, in particular, made a significant impact, especially as I struggled to get my first Salesforce-only job: my ability to translate career languages.
“Huh?”
Let me explain.
I recently started the fourth chapter of my book, which is about leveraging your non-traditional experience in your Salesforce career.
In the chapter, I will share the lessons I learned going from Army Reserve trombone player to Salesforce solution architect. As you can imagine, the journey was not a straight line. There were many twists and turns along the way, plenty of mistakes and setbacks, too.
While writing my first draft of Chapter 4, an idea came to me: Every career has its own “career language.”
Stay with me.
Every job at every company in every industry has its own language, its own tasks, conditions, and standards, to borrow from my time in the military. Accomplishing those tasks under those conditions to meet those standards requires the development of knowledge, skills, and abilities.
The problem is, the knowledge, skills, and abilities developed for one job, company, and industry are often completely foreign to another job, company, and industry. That makes it both difficult and complex to switch careers, especially in the hyper-competitive world of technology.
What can we do to make switching careers easier and simpler?
We must become “career translators” and develop our ability to translate the knowledge, skills, and abilities developed by one career to the knowledge, skills, and abilities required by another. Just as words, written and spoken, must be translated from one language to another, knowledge, skills, and abilities must be translated from one career to another.
That is easier said than done, of course, but the point remains: we must all become translators of our own careers. It is our responsibility to translate our old career language to our new career language to communicate our experience and expertise to others. It is not their responsibility to figure it out on their own without our help.
All experience has value, but we must put in the work to translate that value and communicate it to others. As with most things, translating career languages is a skill you can learn and develop.
What can you do to develop your career translation skills?
Reflect on your non-Salesforce knowledge, skills, and abilities and translate them into Salesforce-ese.
For example, I could reflect on my career as a trombone player in the Army Reserve. At first, I might struggle to translate the knowledge, skills, and abilities into something I can use in my Salesforce career. What does playing trombone in the Army Reserve have to do with Salesforce? Not much, until you dig deeper and realize I managed data, created processes, trained people, etc.
Again, all experience has value, but you must sometimes translate that value from one career language to another.
I would love to hear your feedback on the concept of “career languages,” positive or constructive. As a potential reader of my book, a Salesforce career guide, your feedback is incredibly valuable to me. Just leave a comment and let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you!
Someone looking to get his first job in the Salesforce ecosystem contacted me on LinkedIn and asked for advice. This is the heart of what I told him:
Aside from SFDC skills, are you describing soft skills or other business skills you possess? Communication, training, documentation, planning, business analysis/problem solving, familiarity with other computer systems, data analysis/manipulation/migration? You’ve got experience working with a consultant — take ownership of what you did and describe it in the broadest terms possible — and focus on results and outcomes of the projects (e.g., revenue grew at a record rate, transparency was brought to the company, accountability increased, business processes were streamlined, productivity increased, etc.). Even if your own part in the projects wasn’t wholly responsible for those outcomes, it contributed to them, and talking about them lets employers know you care about business success as well as software configuration.
Hey John!
I really enjoyed reading this article. Up until this point I didn’t realize how reading manuals when I was working on airplanes in the Navy will translate over to what I do now as a Salesforce Admin. As an Admin we have knowledge articles that we can read on how processes work, but it also requires analytical thinking. We don’t want to just go in and make changes because the steps are listed in the manual, we want to be able to take in consideration some of the downstream impacts if we were to make that modification. You wouldn’t want a plane (company) failing in mid-air (during sales process).
Thanks for the great read!
Career Language, the phrase itself oozes so much meaning when you pay attention to it .. thanks for coining the phrase. Salesforce as a CRM and now as a platform of doing so much business with less technical skills needs this book you are writing should we call it dictionary?
This is exactly what I needed to read right now. Thanks for sharing.