Often Trailblazers become overwhelmed when looking at the various options available to them. Trailhead is an amazing resource, but as impressive as it is, it's really easy to get lost or to go off on a tangent by following the suggested Modules once you complete one.
There are YouTube Videos, and there are thousands of them, but how do you know which ones are the best for you? Even if you try to focus on paid resources such as Udemy, you still have hundreds of courses to choose from, and they range massively in price. Some are $20; some are $2000 or more! But what's the difference between them? Once you start adding in blogs, Facebook groups, quizlets and other independent courses, there is much to choose from.
So how do you choose?
A great tip is to focus on the material that aligns with your learning style. When I say this to you, I don't mean exclusively focusing on that type of material ignoring all the rest, I just mean making sure you take into consideration your learning style when compiling your study material. For example, if you know that you are primarily a visual learner, then you should focus on courses such as the ones we have at Get Force Certified, which are clear and concise video lessons.
If you are an auditory learner, then focus on material that will engage your sense of sound, that can be podcasts, or it can be as simple as finding a course where the instructor engages you. If you are kinaesthetic, you will want to focus on things that require you to carry out actions or follow along in Trailhead.
I strongly suggest you use a range of study material that engages all learning styles. Remember how we talk about synergy in the last post? About how a team is more than the sum of all its parts? It’s often referred to as chemistry when talking about sports teams. The idea is that when all the individual parts are combined, they produce an outcome greater than what could be expected. For example, in maths, we know that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, however, when we talk about synergy, 1 +1 + 1 can equal 5, 10, or 100, it all depends on how they combine and complement each other.
If we take this approach to your study material, you can really turbocharge your learning. Combining the various learning types will enable you to learn quicker, faster, and more efficiently. Your ability to learn, understand and recall the information dramatically improves as each learning style is enhanced by the other.
That means that you are going to want to have a mix of material, which can be Trailheads, YouTube Videos, Paid Courses, Podcasts, and Salesforce Documentation.
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There is one resource that needs to be included and maximised for your studies, and that is Trailhead. Trailhead is Salesforce’s free online learning platform and is the best place to get hands-on experience when learning Salesforce. It doesn’t go as detailed as you need for the Certifications but is undoubtedly one of, if not the best learning resource. There is a Prepare for your Salesforce Administrator Certification Trailmix, which is approximately 60 hours long, it's a great starting point and helps you build the understanding of Salesforce that underpins your ability to learn the more intricate details. I’ve heard of great successes when pairing Trailhead with other resources, such as Get Force Certified as you can follow along with the lessons and take advantage of the hands-on environment.
When you create a free Trailhead account, you can create as many free Playgrounds as you want, these are essentially developer edition Salesforce Orgs that allow you to get more hands-on. You can follow along with any courses you have if that walk you through what you need to do, or you can complete the Trailhead Modules and verify that you have completed the steps correctly.
There really is no substitute for getting your hands dirty with Salesforce in a Trailhead Playground or Developer Edition Org.
Another point to consider is that when you get more hands-on, you start to build muscle memory, which enhances your knowledge recall. Imagine you need to tie your lace, you wouldn’t even need to think about how to do it because you have that knowledge and have carried out the task many times. If you had to explain to someone the steps you take to do it, you could quite easily because you have done it so many times.
It’s like driving a car, when you learn to drive a car, just getting the car moving feels complicated, but once you have been driving for a while, you can indicate, turn, change gears, and sing along to the radio without even thinking. And when asked about it, you can recall the steps you take and the order you take them in, not only that, you can explain why you need to press the clutch before you change gear because you have probably tried to change gear without doing that and experienced an awful noise! This kind of hands-on experience is invaluable, and you need to spend time building yours when studying Salesforce.
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Now that you have your study material, you need to organise them, you can do that in the way most suitable for you. Some people use bookmarks, and some people download and use folders.
Personally, I use Notion and recommend it.
I’d recommend that you create an easy-to-follow and easy-to-reference system, something that builds on the step of the one before it. That way you gradually learn, not trying to tackle something huge and insurmountable.
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It's essential that you use the best study material on your journey to becoming Salesforce Certified and that you organise it in an orderly, easy-to-use way.
At Get Force Certified, we do that with our courses, every step builds on the previous step so that you can quickly and continuously progress in your studies. We don’t start by teaching you the most complicated stuff with no context and no real way to relate to it, we start by building small, one step after the other. It's important to keep making progress and the only way you keep making progress is by taking action, which is far easier to do when you feel you are making progress, it's bit like a positive feedback loop!
You need to make sure you use study material that will help you in your studies, not hinder you.
All of our courses are designed with this in mind, we engage your various learning styles to ensure you learn faster, effectively, and efficiently. We include high-quality video lessons with introductions, demonstrations, step-by-step build-a-longs, business use cases, and summaries. All of the audio is crystal clear, and I have intentionally varied my tonality and pitch to keep you engaged; there are no monotone, long-winded explanations to be found here! This means that we are engaging visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learning styles all at once, which results in an increase in understanding and knowledge retention.
I’ve also ensured that each lesson is short, sharp and straight to the point. Why take 20 minutes to explain something that can be explained in 5 minutes? It wastes your time and can often have the negative side effect of making you bored or unengaged.
With our courses, we include cheatsheets for quick and easy reference points, these are fantastic for revision or when you need a top-down view of a concept or topic before you dive in. They are colourful and include a mind map of the concept before diving into deeper detail about it, perfect for when you quickly want to check your understanding. These cheatsheets are primarily focused on visual learning but also help with kinaesthetic learners due to the variety in them and the various colours.
And then we have the practice and mock exams; while these are fantastic for testing your knowledge, they are a great way to enhance your learning. There are sectional quizzes which are helpful when you need to focus on one particular section that you are weak in, the questions are presented in random order from the questions bank, and the answers for the questions are randomised too, meaning that you cannot remember that this question was answer A, because the next time you see it, it may not be in the answer position A.
For the most realistic mock exams, we weigh the questions exactly as you can expect to see them on the Salesforce Certification Exam. For example, the Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam contains the Configuration and Setup section, which is worth 20%. This equates to 12 questions on the exam. When you take our mock exam, you will get 12 questions on Configuration and Setup because that is what you can expect, and the same is true for all of the other sections, that way, you get a highly realistic mock experience. Just as with the sectional quizzes, the questions for the mock exam are taken randomly from a questions bank, and the order of the answers for each question is randomised to prevent pattern learning.
To enhance your learning, we have included full explanations about why an answer to a question is correct or incorrect, including a high-resolution annotated screenshot where relevant.
So if you are studying for your Salesforce Certification and are looking for clear, concise, and comprehensive learning material that will help you learn faster, quicker, and smarter then take a look at our courses!
Thank you for reading,
Dave
