How to Prepare for Salesforce.com Certification

At OpFocus, we place a lot of emphasis on our team members achieving and maintaining certifications. They provide a valuable measuring stick of know-how and experience for both employers and those managing their own careers. If you are considering a career move toward working with Salesforce, achieving a certification will make that move easier. If you are looking to hire people with Salesforce.com skills, you can improve your outcome by focusing on candidates with certifications.

As of January 2013, the current set of Salesforce.com Certifications includes:

If you can afford the time away from work and the cost, training courses can certainly help you prepare for the certification exams. Salesforce.com's training team offers both online and in-person courses on a number of topics and levels.  If you have Salesforce's Premier Success Plan,  you already have access to a library of many pre-recorded Salesforce courses.  There are also Salesforce partner firms offering training courses either online or in various locations.  OpFocus offers admin classes to prepare new hires for the Admin Certification a few times each year and opens its classes to the public.

Beyond training, however, preparation for these exams requires self-study and hands-on practice.  One challenge with Salesforce's relentless pace of new releases is that traditional book publishing can't keep up.  Thankfully Salesforce.com's own documentation team does a FANTASTIC job of keeping the documentation set current to each new release.  There is more in Help than you realize!  For hands-on practice and self study we strongly recommend a combination of the following:

1. Review the Study Guide provided for each Certification.  See the grid above to find links to each certification's page, where the study guides are provided.
2. Read Salesforce's documentation for each study guide topic.  Simply search within Help to learn more.
3. Practice each feature within a Developer Org.  You can sign up for a Developer Edition org at developer.force.com.

One key value of Salesforce.com Certifications is that in order to maintain the certified status, you must pass a "maintenance exam" for each new release.  Salesforce typically has three major releases each year, meaning that there are three catch up exams to complete. Each year, two of these are free, and one costs $100. You must pass all prior release exams in order to complete the current exam. Maintenance exams are taken open book, on-line, and usually consist of 15 or so multiple choice questions to be completed within 30 minutes. Each release's site and release notes provide ample information to use in preparing for the maintenance exams- though hands on time playing with each new feature in a free Developer Edition org or a Sandbox helps.

Please use the Comments section below to let us know of your ways of successfully preparing for certification!