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Salesforce certification guide: Your path to a lucrative career

Author: Sharon Florentine / Source: CIO

Salesforce is one of the fastest-growing, most in-demand skillsets today. From software developers, to solutions architects, to project managers and marketing and sales professionals, Salesforce skills pay off for a wide array of roles.

If you’re looking to land a new job, earn a raise or secure a promotion, Salesforce certification is a great career move, says Meagan Humphrey, director of sales operations at IT recruiting and staffing firm Mondo.

Following is a guide to Salesforce’s wide array of certifications and how achieving one or more can help take your career — and take-home pay — to the next level.

Career benefits of Salesforce certification

“Salesforce certifications offer three big value adds,” Humphrey says. “They increase your marketability in a tight IT job market by allowing you to become a subject matter expert. They offer flexibility in that you can get certified in just a few hours, days or months and you can control your own career path. You can get just one or a bunch of certifications. And the more certifications you add, the higher salary or hourly rate you can command.”

Generally speaking, Salesforce roles range from the technical (architects, developers, implementation experts) to those related to marketing and sales, such as marketing and sales cloud specialists.

IDC research from 2016 predicts that the Salesforce ecosystem will create 1.

9 million “direct” jobs — those within the Salesforce customer base — and as many as 2.8 million “indirect” jobs — positions created in supply and distribution chains connected to Salesforce customers — by the year 2020.

The demand for these roles is already present and won’t be slowing down soon, says Alexandra “Gigi” Neuenfeldt, tri-state and national sales manager for Mondo.

“The demand from the market is really high — demand for developers who can build on and around existing Salesforce platforms, Salesforce administrators, project managers with Salesforce experience, Salesforce training specialists, Salesforce solution architects,” Neuenfeldt says. “Our clients need talent for everything from low-level reporting professionals to high-level developer skills to integrating Salesforce tools and to architects and solutions developers that specialize in customizing the platform to their organization’s needs.”

Salesforce jobs and salaries

A 2017 report from Burning Glass found more than 300,000 job postings between July 2015 and June 2016 that called for Salesforce skills. These roles ranged from those requiring basic understanding of Salesforce’s products to more complex software development roles, with a small but growing category of jobs specifically designed around Salesforce skills, as companies are developing positions to build and maintain Salesforce applications.

Salesforce skills also pay well, the report shows. Jobs that request Salesforce skills pay on average more than $70,000 per year, with Salesforce developers commanding $100,000 on average, according to Burning Glass. Salesforce sales roles offer 8 percent higher salaries than other sales roles, and IT roles that require Salesforce skills carry an 11 percent salary premium. Advanced skills, such as Visualforce and Sales Cloud, command salaries over $100,000.

Professionals can get training and earn “badges” to prove their competency in several areas like security, data integration and business analytics through Salesforce’s Trailhead training platform, says Neuenfeldt, which can help prospective employers notice their skills.

“No matter what your background — technical, marketing, sales, administrative — we feel these are really valuable skills that pay well and have a good future outlook and we don’t think the demand is going away,” she says.

Salesforce certification overview

Salesforce offers a variety of certifications targeted at a range of job functions, including:

Administrators
App builders
Developers
Architects
Consultants
Marketers
Pardots
Specialists

Most tracks offer individual certifications that may be earned to demonstrate generalized or specific expertise in a given domain. The Salesforce Architect track, however, is unique in that candidates can earn individual certifications or they can bundle together these earned certifications (aka specializations) in pursuit of higher-tier certification, such as the Salesforce Certified Application Architect or the Salesforce Certified System Architect. Professionals who pursue both of these architect tracks can then achieve the pinnacle Salesforce Certified Technical Architect.