You may ask, do I really need to do the Salesforce Certified Associate exam before trying to pass the Admin exam? The answer is simple: yes but no. Just joking. Yes, you may skip the Associate exam and go straight to the Admin exam. This is recommended especially if any of the following apply:
- You are starting an SF-related job soon – let’s be brutally honest, the Salesforce Associate exam is a good start but when you have already got a Salesforce job, in 99% of cases that means you know some Salesforce and you would need more skills than are needed from Associate. Rather, you would need at least Admin skills. This is because the Associate is rather one repair wrench and when you start a Salesforce-related job (especially in consulting), you need the whole toolbox already.
- You are already a Salesforce user/superuser/Admin – if you are already in one of these roles, the Associate exam could be tempting as you will pass it without needing to learn it, but it will add almost nothing of value to your career. Of course, you will be “more” certified and will be able to make the “huge” change on LinkedIn, which will be changing “1x Certified” to “2x Certified” on your profile summary, but mostly, that’s it.
- You learn fast or you’ve worked before with other IT tools such as CRM, ERP systems, and so on.
- You have limited funds – Salesforce Associate is not free on a daily basis. Sometimes, Salesforce gives some random discounts that can limit the price to zero or cut the cost, but usually, you need to pay for the exam. If your funds are limited, you may consider skipping the Associate exam as the Admin certificate is much more recognizable and valued than the Associate cert.
Tip
You may already know that there is also another popular Salesforce certificate that is dedicated to programmers. It’s called Platform Developer 1. Some may say that you don’t need to do certs such as Admin or App Builder if you just want to be a programmer. They would be wrong. Salesforce is a platform where one of the most important rules is to try to not use Visualforce…Just kidding. The real rule is “try to configure before starting to code.” As Salesforce gives you a lot of customization possibilities, code-based automation options the starting point should always be declarative customization, click no code aka low code. For this reason, I recommend starting your Salesforce certificate journey with Admin, then App Builder as a prerequisite before jumping to Dev 1, even if you don’t want to be an Admin and do not know what App Builder really is.
Now that you have some basic context about Salesforce exams and being Salesforce certified, let’s see how to make the very first step toward your future Salesforce career and learn how to create your Salesforce test account.