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Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Today we discuss the gift and the curse of the Salesforce Professional world - the relatively low barrier to entry. There are enough real-world cases of a career-pivoting professional spending a few days studying trailheads and taking the $200 Admin exam, skirting by with a 65% score, then landing a plum $100,000 admin role, working from home, rocking a Macbook Pro and company-swag water bottle and hoodie.

Agenda for today includes

• Salesforce Professional - the Low Barrier to Entry

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Low Barrier to Entry

What is it?

Salesforce Orgs need someone to love and take care of them. Who best to do this than someone who has a Salesforce Administrator Certification, accredited by Salesforce themselves?! This cert is no walk in the park, but it also isn't splitting the atom. The Admin Trailmix is ~25hrs, and there is a lot of flex in that depending on your study approach (if you study at all...). The multiple-choice test is 90min. 65% is a passing score.

Why Should I Care?

It depends on your perspective. Let's first look from the perspective of a Salesforce Professional with a track record of success. If the barrier to entry is low, 3 key things will occur -

1. The hiring market becomes saturated. The scenario where good admins are left on the sidelines, and weak admins get good jobs is inevitable. Edge cases, sure, but a higher count of them.

2. Salesforce gets a bad name. An admin is needed to get the org running and/or to keep it running. A weak admin may lead to bad user experience. If users have a bad experience, they tell their sales friends. When their friends hear they may be getting their old CRM replaced with Salesforce at their job, their mind is already made up how they feel about it, and they let their coworkers know. Suddenly, due to negative feedback, Salesforce isn't the only option. What about Hubspot? What about Dynamics? Salesforce is head and shoulders above Hubspot and Dynamics, and this goes to show the compounding power of negative feedback, that they were even considered. Luckily, other CRMs have more negative feedback...

3. The Salesforce Professional community suffers. The capable Salesforce Professionals will feel the impacts that their less capable brethren leave behind. An example of this is coming in behind a weak admin that was let go, and having to refactor a sloppy org. For a community as passionate as Salesforce's, there is something really soul-crushing about a blatantly bad org with bad data modeling, bad automations, and useless reports. This leads to Salesforce Professionals complaining about other Salesforce Professionals. Toxicity ensues, communities break up, locusts arrive, famine, floods, etc etc

The other perspective we need to spotlight is the newly-minted admin who previously had no Salesforce experience, and had heard all of the amazing thing about being a Salesforce Professional. This individual was able to pass the admin exam and the certification gave them instant credibility on the hiring market. The low barrier to entry created new opportunities for them, whether they are fully prepared or not. Let's look at 3 key points for this side -

1. They passed the test themselves. They DID NOT hire themselves. Props for passing the test, now get out there and take advantage of the opportunities you created for yourself! The people at the company doing the hiring need to do their diligence. Just because you, hiring person, are not a Salesforce expert does not mean you don't do your research. Consider the investment you're making - your Salesforce Enterprise licensing is over $100/license and your admin will be making a comfortable salary. You are well into 6-digit annual expense on your org and the people supporting it. You need to treat this like any significant investment and do your research - what are the attributes of a quality admin, what are good interview questions to ask and what is a quality response. The internet is full of excellent resources for this. As well, your Salesforce AE is vested in your success (until they cycle out in Feb...) and can point you in a good direction, if you ask.

2. Salesforce Professionals are Proud...and Loud! This is a good thing and a significant part of what makes the community special! It also attracts a lot of uninitiated. With the constant success stories, the not-so-subtle Trailblazer hoodies, and the Salesforce market cap having approached $300 billion (currently about half that....), there is a lot to be proud and loud about, and we need to expect this will attract new people and be prepared to set a great example for them.

3. If the barrier to entry is too low, then raise it! Salesforce may already be considering this. They recently rolled out some new "introductory" certs like the Salesforce Associate and the Business Analyst certs. Could they be laying the groundwork for prerequisites to the Admin cert? Interestingly, the Admin cert is currently a prerequisite for the BA cert (traditionally, BA is foundational skills and an Admin cert would be more specialized). Perhaps Salesforce is considering a change to ensure their "entry-level" Administrators are better prepared for the challenge of supporting an org and its users.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes