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Since we launched in 2012, nCino has become a worldwide leader in cloud banking and has been on an upward trajectory of massive growth. In order to keep pace with our expanding customer base, we needed to quickly grow our team. When I started at the company in 2016, I was tasked with expanding our team of full stack developers and spearheading the onboarding process — a major project.
From the beginning, it was apparent that the usual developer enablement methods were too slow and not conducive to the level of scaling required to grow our team. But with Trailhead, we were able to meet the demands of this fast-growing company by reducing onboarding time, creating Salesforce "experts," and fostering a culture of ongoing learning. Here, I share the story of how we achieved each of these goals in a relatively short amount of time by tapping into the valuable tools already available to us.
Onboarding is an expensive and time-consuming process for any organization. While you want to ensure your employees have the right skills and knowledge to be successful in their jobs, this can often mean spending a massive amount of time and resources creating and maintaining learning materials. When I took on the project of revising our onboarding process for new developers, I wanted to empower our developers with the right information right away.
This is where the power of Trailhead proved to be invaluable. With Trailhead, we have access to more than 400 modules of free content. On day one, we assign new developers three required trails: Developer Beginner, Developer Intermediate, and Develop Secure Web Apps.
Once developers complete these trails, we know they have the necessary skills to work on their first project in our environment as well as the confidence to own future projects.
Before the implementation of our new onboarding process, our team spent a lot of time working with new developers in an ad hoc fashion. Our previous approach was inefficient and caused a drop in productivity across the team as they had to spend valuable time creating learning materials for our new developers.
The curated Trailhead content gives this time back to our teams and allows management to focus on the development of soft-skills training and delivery of coaching sessions. We can also access content that helps us be more thoughtful in our hiring processes, like the Cultivate Equality at Work trail.
Trailhead allowed us to put the right information into the hands of our developers at a fraction of the time it would have taken to create all our own Training materials. The results were immediately tangible and we now spend 50% less time onboarding our developers.
Our Bank Operating System is built on the Salesforce platform, so it's vital that our developers are Salesforce experts. After initially ramping up on Salesforce with Trailhead, they must continue to skill-up and keep pace with Salesforce innovation.
To ensure all of our developers have the right skills, we mandate that they earn at least two Salesforce Credentials. To help them prepare for their certification and maintenance exams, we encourage them to make use of trailmixes — such as Prepare For Your Salesforce App Builder Credential — that will guide our developers in earning and maintaining their certifications. We're also certain that trailmixes will exponentially help our developers grow their Salesforce knowledge.
While we use Trailhead to continuously drive our developer team to skill up, other departments at nCino are blazing their own trails, too. Take, for example, our colleagues in the Professional Services Organization who rely on Trailhead to ramp up their Salesforce skills. After seeing so much success with Trailhead across the company, nCino has started to use Trail Tracker to incentivize continued professional development through the gamification of learning and leaderboards to promote friendly competition.
The fact is, by using Trailhead as part of our revamped enablement program we've reduced developer enablement from three months down to just six weeks, allowing us to double our team from 30 to 60 developers in less than two years—that's just simply incredible!
Our whole company shows no sign of slowing down with our Trailhead learning. And we're more than eager to see how this will continue to help us all to skill up on Salesforce and focus on our ongoing learning and development.
Looking to get your organization trailblazing together? Learn more with our Top tips for driving Trailhead adoption. And there's a trailmix for that, too! Check out Get your company started with Trailhead.
