How To Become a Salesforce Developer

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that brings companies and customers together. It is ranked as the world’s #1 CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for its features and was announced as the CRM market leader for 6 consecutive years. More than 150,000 companies worldwide namely AWS, Spotify, Toyota, U.S. Bank, Sony etc use Salesforce CRM to scale their businesses. 

Salesforce CRM helps businesses to manage sales, marketing and customer service providing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud to ultimately achieve higher ROI.

SFDC AKA Salesforce dot com or Salesforce.com launches new releases every year with new features to ease the job of developers while developing and deploying the software for clients. Hence its usage has been rapidly growing over the world. It is expected that Salesforce generates about 3.3 million employment opportunities by 2022, whereas there are 1.5 Salesforce developers currently. The salary for a Salesforce developer is highly competitive, according to Indeed, the average salary for a Salesforce developer is 117k per year.

Besides, Salesforce has become so popular among fresh graduates and working developers due to its unique advantages such as you don’t have to code from scratch and work both on the frontend and backend. So, if you are also an aspiring Salesforce developer but do not know how and where to start, this article is for you. Stick till the end to discover detailed information about the Salesforce career and how to become a successful Salesforce developer.

Roles of a Salesforce Developer

There are usually two types of job roles for a Salesforce developer based on different business needs: Salesforce customization and Salesforce configuration.

Salesforce customization includes customizing complex business processes where automation is difficult.

Salesforce configuration includes setting up Salesforce with no coding involved. Constructing objects, fields, tables, building relationships between them come under configuration. Businesses typically employ a Salesforce administrator for this purpose.

On the other hand, a highly experienced Salesforce developer role is similar to professional developers and they are responsible for developing custom apps using Apex, Visualforce or frameworks like Lightning Component.

Salesforce Career Path

A Salesforce developer’s career path consists of three levels: junior, middle and senior developer. However, there are different areas (let’s see that in the below section) one could choose at any stage of the career and grow.

As a junior, you start as an admin or developer and gradually grow in your career to become a senior Salesforce developer. As a senior developer, you can become a Salesforce architect and Salesforce consultant at the next level.

A Salesforce administrator is a process specialist who also possesses excellent customer service, communication and analytical skills to deal with consumers and clients directly.

Once you gain good experience in it, you can choose to step up the technical ladder and become a consultant. The responsibilities include project analysis, design, creation, acting as a bridge between developers and management. This role is somewhat similar to a senior developer.

Now comes the highest level of Salesforce developer career path related to technology development – Salesforce architect. A Salesforce architect designs a Salesforce CRM architecture model, custom implementations and should have in-depth knowledge of the domain.

How to become a Salesforce Developer?

Now comes the actual part of the article – how to become a Salesforce developer. Without any further ado, let’s quickly get into it.

First things first. An aspiring Salesforce developer should obtain a bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering or related fields. Secondly, you should have an understanding of programming languages such as Java, .NET, or OOPS. This helps you in gaining the Salesforce advanced learning quickly. Don’t worry if you do not have any understanding of these coding languages. You can anytime take an online course for such basics, or else, you can skip it.

Now, it’s time to learn the basics of Salesforce and get some knowledge on Salesforce development. If you have just got out of college, then getting into an internship works well to start your career in Salesforce. You can either start as a programmer or a junior developer with the skills and experience you gained from it.

In case it’s been long since your college days ended, you can consider taking online courses and get some certifications. Certifications not only help you in cracking your job interviews but also teach you skills your employer wants you to have.

There are a variety of platforms such as Udacity, Udemy etc to learn basic and advanced Salesforce skills. You can also learn Salesforce in Trailhead, a free online training website for Salesforce. It is completely okay to take a maximum of 3 months to study, pass the tests to avail of certifications that really help you in kick-starting your career. Here are 5 certifications that add weight to your resume.

• Salesforce Certified Administrator
• Salesforce Certified Administrator
• Sales Cloud Consultant
• Service Consultant
• Salesforce Certified App Builder

Now, let’s get into the critical part, landing your dream job. It is highly important to become more comfortable with Salesforce. You need to use Salesforce applications and your knowledge of it more often in your daily life to get adapted to it. Especially if you are someone from a non-coding background. 

Also, stay up to date and hone your skills by practising and correcting your errors or mistakes you made in previous interviews. You can always use static code analysis tools to analyze your code and detect the defects. Such tools come in handy when you are actually working on Salesforce development for a business. Also, join in developer community forums, ask questions, share and gain knowledge and ensure you are on the right and updated track.

Here are a few areas you may need to get specialized to become an on-demand Salesforce developer:

• Security Platform Development
• Salesforce App Customization
• Data Modeling & Management
• Visualforce
• Developer Console
• Apex
• Lightning Framework

Finally, if you are wondering what are the basic skills (other than technical aspects) a good Salesforce developer should have, then this is for you.

Analytical skills: As a Salesforce developer, you need to analyze the customer or client needs to design the software that matches his requirements.

Problem-solving skills: Although there are numerous tools to detect the errors for you, it is the developer who fixes the bug. Moreover, a good Salesforce developer has to have an eye on potential minor details that cause bigger problems.

Interpersonal skills: A Salesforce developer needs to be a good team player with good communication skills to clearly communicate the business needs with clients and instructions with team members.

Bottom Line

As you can see, there is huge scope for the future of Salesforce. More and more companies are switching to Salesforce CRM eventually generating millions of jobs. So, if you have already set your heart in Salesforce, it’s high time to take Salesforce training, practice and hone your skills. Hope this article helps you in kick-starting your career as a Salesforce developer.