How I passed 12 Salesforce Certifications in 2 weeks

9 useful tips to achieve your own certifications goal

Introduction

This article doesn’t intend to give you all the magic tricks you need to pass all the Salesforce certifications you want. This article describes my personal experience in achieving my own goal and I wrote it with the hope that it helps and encourages other Salesforce developers to achieve their owns.

I’ve personally never been a huge fan of certifications. Especially not a fan of just taking them for the sake of taking certifications. I consider them important to prove that you master an area of knowledge, but I would never recommend anyone to take a certification of an area they don’t have experience with.

During my years as a consultant, I learned that not always the most certified candidates are the best ones, but rather the ones with real experience in consultancy. So even if they came along with a very powerful CV from the point of view of the certifications I always asked them the same technical questions and put them through the same technical exercises, sometimes even harder.

1 Set a clear and realistic goal

Ask yourself which certifications you want to achieve and why. Think of which areas you have the most experience with, and how these certifications will help you achieve your next steps in your career.

In my case, with my experience as a functional/technical consultant, I decided to focus on certifications that would prove my abilities as a consultant and architect.

When I decided to start this challenge I had two certifications under my belt: Salesforce Certified Administrator and Salesforce Certified Platform App builder.
So I decided to take the following ones:

Salesforce Advanced Administrator, to complement the basic Administrator one.

The three consultant certifications related to the clouds I had more experience with:

• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Community Cloud.

All the ones I needed to become a System Architect and Application architect:

• Certified System Architect
• Certified Application Architect
• Certified Platform Developer I
• Certified Sharing and Visibility Designer
• Certified Data Architecture and Management Designer
• Certified Integration Architecture Designer
• Certified Development Lifecycle and Development Designer
• Certified Identity and Access Management Designer

I had some previous experience with other salesforce products like Pardot or Einstein Analytics, but I decided to only take certifications where I had much previous knowledge and experience.

2 Set free time

I had been prioritizing my work over my certifications for many years until I came to the conclusion that I needed to free up some time to take all the exams I wanted. Working as a freelancer gave me this possibility, so I decided to take a one month break in between projects to focus on myself. I am aware this is not as easy for everyone, but you can adapt it to yourself and your possibilities.

3 Make a plan

Take all the certifications you want to achieve, make a plan and update it as you go. It is impossible to know in advance how easy or difficult a certification is going to be. So read the contents for all the exams and make a realistic plan, but don’t worry if you have to change it afterward. My original plan was to use the whole month, but I ended up using only two weeks.

4 Have a routine

Establish a routine to study for all your exams.
First, read through the exam outline to see which areas of knowledge have a higher percentage in the exam. This gives you a very good idea about what you need to focus on.

Second, read the experiences of other people that took that exam before. There are very good guides online, written by people with great expertise that helped me a lot. If you see there are some topics you don’t have enough experience with, read about them in detail.

Third, find some existing questions online, and go through them. Do not learn the answers, this is about understanding the concepts behind them. When you don’t understand the answer, or you find it incorrect, go and search in the documentation. The internet is full of wrong materials so be careful with that, only trust what you understand.

5 Use a developer org

There will be topics and features you don’t have experience with. Use a developer org to try them out so you understand them better. Just reading through the documentation is not enough for some of them, and some quickly hands-on experience will help you understand how the feature works.

6 Take the exams at home

I recommend you take the exam at home. Although it can be a bit of a pain the first time (you need an external webcam, install the correct software, read the instructions carefully…) it is really nice once you set it up one time. In my case, I liked taking the exams at the very end of the day, close to midnight or even later, so taking them from home gave me the flexibility to schedule them when I wanted.

7 Schedule the exams in advance

Book all the exams at once before you start studying. Set a future date for all of them, as rescheduling them is free if you are not within the previous 24 hours. This gives you the flexibility to reschedule for the next hour once you feel you are ready. If you take the exams at the end of the day you should not have problems to find a free slot.

8 Be focused and structured during the exam

Some exams are easier than others, and maybe an exam you expected to be quite easy becomes one of the hardest ones. Don’t panic if this happens. Failing is not ideal but sometimes it is part of the learning process. In any case, follow the same pattern in all your exams: first, read the question carefully and answer if you are sure about it. Do not get stuck in a question, if you feel this is happening, just mark it to review it later and go to the next one. You always have time to go back to the ones you were not sure about.

9 Keep calm if you fail

If you have the feeling you are going to fail, take the remaining time to go through the questions you are unsure about and try to memorize them, or at least the concepts they refer to. As soon as the exam finished, take paper and pen and write down everything you remember. This information will be very useful to face the next study session.

Conclusion

Taking Salesforce certifications can be great for your career, especially if you work as a freelancer, but be smart selecting the ones you want to take and be structured with the study routines. You just need a clear goal and a good plan to make it happen. Good luck!