Is it even possible to learn Salesforce without working in Salesforce at your job? This question is asked many times by Salesforce Admin wannabes. The answer is: yes, yes, yes!
I like to say that the Salesforce job market has quite a low entry threshold when comparing it to other popular IT platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft CRM, and so on. This is because of a few important reasons:
- You may learn Salesforce on your own, at your own pace, using Salesforce’s free learning platform, Trailhead.
- Salesforce exams are not too expensive – this is of course a relative statement, but when comparing Salesforce exam prices to other technologies’ exam prices, the Salesforce ones are not as pricey.
- In addition, you can get a fully useful and free test environment that you can use to get to know the platform and customize, build, and destroy safely. In this section, we will show you how to do this.
Free Salesforce environments
There are two types of free Salesforce environments: Developer Edition orgs and Trailhead Playgrounds. Let’s see what the differences are and how to create each one.
Free Developer Edition environment
“What? A developer environment? Should I use it, given that I’m not a developer and have no intention of becoming one?” The answer is straightforward: yes, you can use it even if you are not a programmer. Think of it as a name that Salesforce has assigned to its demo account. To see a more detailed explanation, let’s take a look at how Salesforce describes its Salesforce Developer orgs on their pages: “A Salesforce Developer environment grants you access to a fully featured copy of Force.com, absolutely free, and yours to use indefinitely. Utilize the Developer Organization to stay current with the latest features, construct your own applications, and test functionalities prior to their purchase.” This implies that you can access the Developer Edition for free, forever and ever. It encompasses both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud features, enabling you to explore and experiment with both sales-related and customer-support-related functionalities within a single space.
Can you generate multiple Developer Edition environments? Yes, you can. Will you create more than one? Yes, you certainly will! Based on practical experience, I can confirm that you’ll utilize dev orgs for customizable experimentation, constructing numerous automations, preparing job interview demonstrations, and a wide array of other tasks. And you will do it a lot. For these reasons, it’s often preferable to initiate with a fresh new environment rather than attempting to “repair” the alterations you made in your existing orgs.