6 Steps you must take to become a Salesforce developer

Salesforce developers are one of the career paths with a lot of demand. As a Salesforce developer, you are saddled with the responsibility of managing Salesforce CRM services on the cloud. You also design, build and develop new cloud applications for the effective management of customer relations. 

According to Glassdoor, Salesforce Developers make an average of $103,032 per annum in the US. But to become a Salesforce Developer, there are steps that you must take. Perhaps, first is to become a Salesforce Admin. As a Salesforce Admin, you basically work with the various stakeholders of your company to ensure that the Salesforce platform is customized to meet your needs. In this role, you get used to the interface of Salesforce and how to navigate the platform. As a Salesforce developer, however, it is a step further to build the system. 

In this article, we will discuss the key steps you must take to become a Salesforce developer. Let’s dive into it. 

What you must do to become a Salesforce developer?

1. Master Salesforce Admin

As discussed earlier, becoming a Salesforce Admin makes you good at navigating the platform and performing various CRM operations. At the very least, you need to be conversant with a platform you want to build upon or tweak. If you are a complete beginner, you can set aside some time to master Salesforce Admin. 3 months of consistency would be sufficient. You can join a Salesforce admin training to get started. A simple search for Salesforce admin certification training near me would suffice. 

2. See yourself as a Developer

To transition from Admin to Developer, you need to see yourself in that space. You need to recognize that you are moving away from just playing around with services to the building and maintaining them. Remember, the primary duty of a Salesforce developer should be to use programming skills to improve existing applications on Salesforce and create custom-made applications to suit your needs. Here are some ideas you can begin to work with. 

• One important mindset to have is to automate repetitive tasks in your workflow. Heard about the dry principle in programming? It means do not repeat yourself. If you must have a robust and efficient system, you must make sure that repetitive processes are not done manually. 
• Secondly, do not run away from problems. Your goal is to find them and create customized solutions on the platform. For instance, you may observe that your organization needs to know the exact platform that traffic is coming from. But your landing page links are scattered around. You can create a customized system that tracks where the links are coming from and not just general platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. 

3. Get familiar with coding. 

I’d be blunt here. You cannot run away from coding as a Salesforce developer. The onus is on you to solve problems with coding. So it becomes critical to understand how to code. In case you do not know, Salesforce has a customer programming language called Apex and a User Interface language called Visualforce. 

But jumping right into these languages can be confusing since they are not as popular as the general programming languages such as Python, Java, Javascript, etc. As a general rule of thumb, you can start with Java. The reason is that the syntax of Java is almost as similar to that in Apex. Having a decent understanding of Java will make learning Apex and Visualforce a breeze. 

If you want to learn Java, there are various online Java courses that you can join and get started right away. 

4. Begin your Salesforce Developer Journey with Trailhead

Now you have your basics right. It’s time to jump into Salesforce as a Developer. First thing first, comb Salesforce trailhead resource. Trailhead is an online resource by Salesforce, where anyone can learn Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer for free. The modules there are well organized and it is just a great place to get the ball rolling. 

One downside with trailhead is that modules there are almost completely theoretical. You may not be able to apply the things you have learned to the goal. Nevertheless, it is a great place to get started with Salesforce even as a complete beginner. 

5. Join an online Salesforce certification course

Having done the fundamentals, the next step is to acquire some certifications. As a beginner, you could attempt two developer certifications:

• Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder
• Platform Developer 1
• Platform Developer 2

These are great certifications to get you underway. To get these certifications however, it is strongly advisable to join a Salesforce certification course. There, you will get a personalized tutelage on how to ace your certification exam. You would also get the right resources and training materials that will get you prepared. 

You can decide to choose any of the two certifications listed above. However, if you want a less technical involvement, you may want to go for the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder. The Platform Developer 2 contains real coding questions. Thus, you are only advised to go for it if you have sufficient coding experience. 

6. Join a community and be active there. 

To nurture your skill and learn new trends, it is important to join a local community. This is a fantastic place to network, learn, share and grow. You may also connect with someone who is in your shoes – planning on transitioning from a Salesforce Admin to a Salesforce developer. Also, you can get access to conferences and meetups where you learn from experienced speakers. 

Wrapping up

Salesforce Developer is indeed a fantastic career path. But just like in every field, there are processes involved in going up the ladder. In this article, we have discussed the things you should do in order to move from being a complete beginner to becoming a Salesforce developer. Get started already!