Back to all stories

I have been involved with salesforce.com for quite a few years starting from a customer perspective through to a consultant and now as Managing Director of a Salesforce Consulting Partner. During this time I have absorbed knowledge from being hands-on or those around me and also with the help of the Salesforce Success Community and Training that I have undertaken.

All of this culminated in becoming a Salesforce MVP in Summer ‘13. But one thing nags at me. I am like many people who have been on a journey with Salesforce, I have never become certified. As I wrote this blog it struck me how important the certification process is as it ensures we are all recognised for our knowledge and we can all say we truly understand Salesforce. If you are certified then you are the go-to person in your organisation/company or amongst your peers and the Salesforce Community at large.

One of the benefits of being a Salesforce MVP is that I get to interact with a brilliant bunch of people. There are currently over 130 MVP’s from across the globe and our backgrounds are all different with some being customers, others are consultants and quite a few more that are developers and Technical Architects. The one thing we all have is a passion for Salesforce and the Salesforce Community.

During the recent MVP Summit in San Francisco I had the pleasure of spending several days with my fellow MVP’s and, amongst other things, we talked about how they are driving their local Salesforce Community with all things Salesforce.

One of the best things to come out of these conversations was finding out how successful the Salesforce Certification Study Group, that Deepa Patel kicked off, has been with numerous participants gaining their Salesforce Certification.

As I blogged on the Morphate blog this week, the program has been such a success that it has expanded to the UK and we are now rolling it out across Australia and New Zealand.

The Study Group should not be seen as training or replacing the need for training. It is to help those of us who have at least 6 months Salesforce experience come together with others to study together and help gain your certification.

Alek Gokiert has volunteered to be the ANZ Group Leader and will be running the curriculum, over a 14 week period, for the 201 (Admin) Certification. There will be Sales and Service cloud study groups and a Dev 401 is currently under construction.

Our goal is to drive an increase in certifications across the region.

So this is an example of what your local Salesforce community is doing. Jump into the success community group, connect with Alek and get the ball rolling. Also we need some Salesforce Rockstars to help facilitate - if you are up for it reach out in the community group and connect and let’s make it happen.

So, who is going to take up the challenge? I’m the first one to put my hand up and join the 201 group. Want to join me on the challenge?