Salesforce Study Plan

Jan 18 / Dave Massey


“Failing to plan is planning to fail” - Benjamin Franklin


When it comes to preparing and studying for your Salesforce Certifications, I believe a comprehensive study plan can make a huge difference to your chances of success. By spending the time to construct and compile a comprehensive study plan you can ensure that the time you spend studying is highly effective and beneficial.
Often I speak to Trailblazers who feel overwhelmed, and some of the most common comments I hear are “I don’t know where to begin”, “Where do I start?”, and “I don't know where I am up to with my studies and if I am ready yet?”. And it's completely understandable, there is so much material to get through and so many resources that you can reference that it can just feel all too much.
Thats why a study plan is critical to your success.

What is a study plan?

At its most basic form a study plan is simply a timetable of when you will study, this can be useful as it adds structure to the days, weeks, or possibly months leading up to your Certification exam ensuring that you have designated times to study.
But I like to take it one step further.
I think that a timetable specifying when you study is a great starting point, however, I’ve experienced sitting down to study and not knowing actually knowing what I was going to study. It would then take me a good 10 - 15 minutes to figure out which concept or topic I was going to study and by that point I had already wasted a large chunk of my study time and usually my motivation and concentration.
That's why I like to state what I will study in each time slot. I usually create my study plan after I have broken the exam guide down and collated all of my study material so at this point I already have a really good idea of what I need to study. I take those concepts and add them to my timeslots, making sure that I have enough time to really get to grips with them.
You don’t have to get as granular as the specific concept that you will study, you could just detail the Objective that you will be focusing on. The idea is that the study plan should become a plan of what you will study, it shouldn’t become a prison that you feel guilty deviating from, but more of a path to follow.
What this does is allow you to maximise the time that you spend studying by removing the need to figure out what you should be studying at the start of your study session. It enables you to sit down and just get studying. This can save you a huge amount of time during your studies as well as having a number of beneficial psychological effects.

The Psychological Impact

It reduces the sense of the enormity of the task at hand. When we don’t have a full picture of what is required, or what we need to do, we often overestimate and overcomplicate the effort or time required and this can have a significant psychological impact. It can cause you to resist studying and to even avoid it completely as you think that the task is so huge that you just cant face it, its just too daunting.
Thats one of the causes of procrastination, we sit down to study and then decide we need to clean our desks first, or grab a quick drink, or even find the perfect playlist to study to which results in going down a YouTube rabbit hole! We find something that is much more manageable that we know we can accomplish quickly.
By plotting the concepts and topics into your study plan everything becomes clearer and feels much more manageable, this increases your motivation and reduces the stress you feel of not knowing what it is that you need to do. You know that when you sit down, there is no uncertainty over what you will study, this removes the not knowing and reduces the ambiguity of our study sessions. 
I often combine my study plans with a number of the other study techniques that we will go into in future study tips posts such as spaced repetition, the Pomodoro technique, and much more.
One tip I would give you is that when you create your study plan make sure you leave gaps for recaps, these are timeslots close to your exam date that allow you a bit of freedom to focus on the concepts or topics that you need extra time on.
So there you have it, Salesforce study plans.
I would really recommend that you create a comprehensive study plan when studying for your Salesforce Certification. Make sure that you give yourself enough time before your exam, you decide what you will study in each session, and you leave gaps for recaps.

Thank you for reading

Dave