5 Tips for taking and passing your Salesforce certs
In the current climate, lots of Salesforce professionals are using their time to get their Salesforce credentials. I’ve been seeing a lot of posts via social media asking for tips or places to go to find good study material or tips that’ll help you ace that upcoming exam. I’m going to break down 5 tips I wish someone had told me when taking my first Salesforce exams.
One of the first mistakes that people make, and i’m a sucker for this, is not booking the exam. There’s a really good quote ‘if it’s important to you you’ll find a way. If not you’ll find an excuse.’ We feel like we’re ready, then we just get stuck in this cycle of putting it off, then it never gets done. If you feel like you’re ready, then book your exam, it doesn’t have to be for the next day even if it’s a month or two months time, it gives you something to work towards and you have it booked in.
If you’re also one of those people (again i’m guilty) who reschedules once it gets to the day before you’re supposed to be taking the exam, unless it’s for a valid reason like you personally feel you’re not ready or something has come up meaning you can’t take it, then don’t reschedule. Don’t let yourself be your worst enemy, try the exam, even if you fail you’ve experienced the questions and are better setup to take it again.
This is probably the best tip I can give you. Finding the right study material is fundamental in preparing for an exam. Sometimes I see people asking for answers, or they’ve found a quizlet with the answers on then spend an hour doing those and think they’re ready to pass the exam. Wrong. There is no fast or cheat way to take Salesforce exams, and if you did come across correct answers, for your personal sake you should ignore them and learn like everyone else. These quizlets that people find are often from years ago and heavily outdated with wrong answers causing more detriment than benefit. Salesforce is continuously updating it’s features and exam questions, and materials like these are not always updated, so just think next time you come across them.
Now we’ve covered the don’ts, lets look at the do’s and example what material we SHOULD be using.
Trailhead - As we’ve explained in our first blog here, Trailhead should always be your first go to when studying for an exam. There is an official certification page here which has every exam including the study guide and trailmix for that exam. You can also use the searchbar to search for tailmixes created by people like you and me. Trailhead allows you to get hands on and put all you’ve learnt into something real, even if you don’t use Trailhead to study, use your dev orgs to put what you’ve learnt into practice! practice practice practice.
Go to Trailhead certification page using this link. You can select your career path, depending on which exam you’re taking
Then pick which exam you want from below
This will now show you everything you need to know about the exam. Which trailmixes you should do, the outline of the exam and the study guide. It’s a great resource.
FocusOnForce - One that I recommend and a lot of my colleagues and friends also recommend. FocusOnForce is a site which you can purchase study guides and sample exam questions, giving a full breakdown of the exam and a taste of what the questions are like in the real thing. The site is continuously being updated and is great because it provides a breakdown of why an answer is correct which most materials do not. The prices are relatively cheap, around 20$/per exam for the sample questions but definitely worth it. Here are the exams they have available at the moment, so if you’re studying for one of these, check them out.
Your network - If follow people working with Salesforce you’ll usually see a few posts of people posting their pass certificate. Someone who has taken the exam and passed could be your best bet for passing it yourself. People are usually very friendly within this space, so if you see one of these posts don’t feel bad asking for any study material they used to pass, as well as congratulating them of course!. You can also ask colleagues/friends if they’re also taking exams. The only thing to bear in mind is that something which works for one person may not work for you, so don’t expect to pass just because they did.
Use social media - This is a great place to find lots of material and helpful links when it comes to exams. One thing i’ve seen recently is buddying up with others who’re taking the exam and creating a study group vibe, this is a great environment to bounce ideas off eachother and learn what has worked/hasn’t worked whilst studying. You will also often see virtual study groups or virtual sessions posted which there is no harm in joining. Jump on Twitter/LinkedIn and start following people in the Salesforce space and you’ll soon be flying.
Proper preparation prevents poor performance.. i’m sure is a quote that you’ve heard. Preparing for a Salesforce exam can be stressful, you never really know if you’re ready or not, but you have to take a shot at it. With the current situation you’re only able to take your exam virtually and not visit the exam centre. Whilst it’s easier to take the exam in your own home, it has some added stress. Here are a couple of tips for preparing to take your exam virtually:
Make sure you have a good webcam - Until now you’ve needed an external webcam to take exams, meaning you have to plug it into your laptop/pc and then place it in a location in which the invigilator can see your screen and you. They’re fairly cheap to find second hand or purchase these days but worth looking around. Logitech offer some great webcams which I personally use. I have heard now from a few people this requirement has been relaxed a little so you should be good with your built in web camera (don’t quote me on this)
Install everything you need to - Make sure you have installed all the software needed for your camera/exam. Salesforce exams are run through sentinel so you’ll need to download that and it’s worth running a camera test to ensure everything is working correctly before you launch the exam. Trailhead has a good article here on preparing.
Setup your environment - Ensure your environment is decluttered and nobody is going to disturb you. If the invigilator thinks you’re looking somewhere else than the screen your exam will be paused automatically and they will contact you through chat before unpausing. It’s not the end of the world but it’s unnecessary stress which you don’t need. Make sure to remove anything of your wrist etc also)
Launch the exam before it starts - There is some initial setup you need to do before you can start your exam. The camera needs to recognise yourself and sometimes this takes a while (if you’ve taken online exams trying to get the red box to go green is a nightmare). Just give yourself enough time to set this up and sort it out if anything goes wrong. You can always contact Kryterions support if anything does go wrong, they’re pretty helpful.
Stay calm - It’s easy to work yourself up if the setup goes wrong or you’re nervous. You’ve prepared for this exam and thinking positively is the only way you’re going to pass. If you have technical issues it can always be resolved and you won’t lose your exam slot.
FocusOnForce has a great article explaining further here if you want to check it out.
Salesforce exams are tricky. You need to understand your exam and the sort of questions you could be asked. The best place to start understanding this is the exam guide, which you can access via Trailhead as we outlined above. This document holds really helpful information such as, the pass mark, useful trailmixes and a full breakdown of the exam and it’s percentages. This is important you look at to understand what you should be studying. Lets take the admin exam here:
From this we can tell which areas we should focus on and how much we need to be comfortable with a certain feature. Over 50% of the exam is covered in Security and Access/Standard and Custom Objects/Sales and Marketing Applications/Service and Support Applications, so this gives us a great place to start, seeing as the pass mark is 65%. If you also click into each feature it’ll explain what you need to be able to do. This applies to all exams, not just administrator.
Another important thing to understand is the way the questions are asked/worded. They can be very sneaky sometimes. All the questions are multiple choice and sometimes require more than one answer. It will always tell you in the question how many answers you must select so make sure to pay attention. If you struggle on any question you can mark them for review to come back to at the end.
Make sure you read the questions multiple times, as I mentioned they’re sneaky to try and catch people out. The sample questions from FocusOnForce are a great way to understand the way in which you will be asked questions. Take your time, you can always come back.
Use all your time. Depending on the exam you get a good amount of time to answer all the questions. If you finish early, go back over your questions and answers, you might have missed something the first time. Too many people make the mistake of finishing the exam early and then not using the rest of the time they have to double/triple check.
Last but not least.. DON’T GIVE UP. It’s easy to take a knockback when you don’t pass.. but it shouldn’t be an excuse for you to give up. Exams are a great way of showing your Salesforce knowledge and should be difficult to achieve. I failed my admin the first time I took it, but it gave me experience of the exam, I identified my weak points (you now get a breakdown of your percentage but you didn’t before) and then retook the exam which I passed. Use your failure as a way of learning, seeing where your weak points are, improving them and then taking another go!.
I feel like a motivational speaker writing this, but keep trying and good luck on sitting your Salesforce exams!. If this post helped you pass i’d love to hear about it so please tag me in any of your posts @forcewithluke1 (twitter)
