Under the term Salesforce Trailhead, Salesforce offers a learning platform with comprehensive content for a wide variety of roles in order to constantly expand your personal Salesforce skills.
This content is divided into trails, trail mixes, modules and projects, and you collect points, badges and super badges. Yes, it’s all a bit confusing, but over time you gain an overview and understand the connections.
Salesforce Trailhead: Trails
In the English version, there will soon be 800 trails that can be “hiked”, and in German there are already a considerable number of trails to acquire knowledge on various topics. On the basis of sometimes a bit lot of text, it is necessary to get to know the most diverse Salesforce functions and to apply them practically either in the form of control questions or – much more time-consuming – in the form of an independently executed implementation in a so-called playground (Salesforce learning environment). The independently created implementation is then automatically checked for correctness.
Badges and Trailmixes
Salesforce Trailhead comes with gamification ideas, which means you collect points, complete trails, receive badges and can make it to the ranger rank. And if you feel fit enough, you can get to the Super Badges: These are then a lot more complex to implement and can easily take up a whole day’s work.
In addition to many prepared trail mixes, which you can filter together based on your role and your personal learning goals, it is also possible to put together your own learning paths in order to, for example, deepen your knowledge of security.
Trailhead Academy and Community
Trails are also a good preparation for a planned Salesforce certification. Salesforce has its own offers for preparation in the Salesforce Trailhead Academy, but if you want to become a certified administrator, for example, the trails are a good starting point. I will report more about the certifications in a future blog post.
Salesforce Trailhead is also a great place to immerse yourself in the Salesforce community and interact with other Salesforce Admins and users. This takes place on the Trailblazer Community, where you can also find other important information about Salesforce.
For iOS, there is the Trailhead app. So you can continue learning on the road, because when it comes to Salesforce, you never stop learning.
So everything is great?
Yes and no. Salesforce Trailhead is a very good introduction to the world of Salesforce if you are able to spend enough time and concentration. However, many tasks are lengthy, knowledge control is often typically multiple choice, and you quickly get tempted to simply want to collect a lot of badges but not really learn much that will last. On the other hand, the content is extremely well prepared and explained, and you get an impression of the complexity of the topic and know that you have to deal with it in depth before you can “click off” in your own Salesforce platform.
Trailhead also shows how important it is not to put off the tasks of business analysis and solution design on the Salesforce platform. Only when the requirements are clear should one plunge into implementation. Of course, prototyping is always allowed.
Furthermore, Trailhead is not the right place to learn real best practices. You will notice this especially when you have to implement the tasks in the playgrounds. Often solutions are worked out that could not be rolled out in a professional environment. But to be fair, that would be too much to expect from this learning environment, which is really well done.
myTrailhead for corporations
Trailhhead is also licensable as myTrailhead as a product for companies to offer internal knowledge transfer on this platform. The content development is surely the Herculean task, but to look at the product more exactly is definitely worthwhile.
Not learning alone
What is missing? It is always the same: you learn on your own. Of course there is a community where I can ask a question and wait for an answer. But basically there is no one I can ask ad-hoc, who accompanies me, with whom I can discuss my specific requirements. Nobody who can teach my learning level and develop me. There is no one there who can explain something from multiple perspectives, provide me with experience and best practices, with a focus on high quality implementation and well thought-out business processes.
Therefore my recommendation: watch Trailhead, get familiar with it and learn it in a meaningful way. But acquire deeper and lasting knowledge in personal trainings.
André Ryf
André Ryf is Salesforce consultant, trainer and coach and owner of squiis, your personal Salesforce Partner.
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