Feb 20, 2019 By Kris Lande

The Big Idea of Trailhead: Fun, Free Learning for All

in IT, Learning, Corporate Culture

We’re posting a series of vignettes to celebrate Salesforce’s 20th birthday. Follow our digital scrapbook to get a behind the scenes glimpse of our history.

Innovation is at the heart of everything we do at Salesforce. Trailhead is no exception. Before it became the learning platform that we know and love today — it was just an idea. A big idea sparked by the need to scale Salesforce learning and make it accessible to all.

Fun fact: Josh Birk, Developer Evangelist, originally pitched “Medals”

But a big idea needs awesome people to make it work. We quickly learned to harness the power of teamwork. A scrappy, cross-functional, highly collaborative group all driven by the same mission to shake up the status quo.

We launched Trailhead at Dreamforce '14 with 11 badges and 3 trails

We acted with intention in everything we did. We made Trailhead for everyone — free, self-led learning enabling anyone to develop in-demand skills. And thereby pushing the needle of diversity in tech.

The big idea behind Trailhead?

Accessible learning — make it free and available to anyone regardless of background, age, gender, ability, learning style, or belief
Gamified learning — make it engaging, hands-on, motivational and fun, help people to reach their learning goals.

The 2015 April Fool's Catter badge was the purr-fect hit

Short, bite-sized content — make it easy to consume wherever, whenever and remove the intimidation of learning a new skill.
Life-long learning — make it continuous with fresh content that keeps up with the latest technology trends.
Foster the Ohana spirit — help mold the best professionals by adding Salesforce values and soft-skills content.

Create Trailblazers — the pioneers, the innovators, the leaders who leave a path for others to follow. And most importantly, a person who builds a better world for others.

Fun fact: The Trailblazer hoodie was originally designed in gray! A happy accident with the first shipment gave us the iconic black one we have today.

We kept our Ohana in our #Trailhearts—putting our users at the center of everything, daring ourselves to challenge the norm by reinventing learning. But more than that, Trailhead was also developed to help connect the community. To share ideas and solutions, network, and support each other.

And Trailhead was embraced whole-trail-heartedly. In four short years, we reached 1 million learners and 10 million badges earned. And the team has grown too!

What's next for Trailhead? Even MOAR learning. As we continue to empower you, our community of Trailblazers, to blaze your own trail to the career of your dreams.