Whats The Most Effective Way For You To Learn?

Dec 14 / Dave Massey
When it comes to studying to pass the Salesforce Administration Certification Exam, it's important that we maximise our time, we want to make sure that any time we spend preparing for the exam is time well spent and not time wasted. This doesn’t just apply to the Salesforce Administrator Certification but to all Salesforce Certification Study.

That's why we are going to talk about your learning style preference.We want to make sure that every minute we spend studying for the exam is effective and efficient, and to do that, we need to make sure that we are fully engaging our minds which will improve our learning speed, enhance knowledge retention and have a significant impact on our knowledge recall.

What's the point of spending 4 hours studying if you can’t remember a single thing you covered?

Everyone Learns Differently

It's important to know that everyone learns differently, too often people don’t realise this and they will spend hours and hours studying in the same way without making any real progress. Have you ever read over the same paragraph 4 or 5 times and not been able to recall what you just read? Or perhaps you watched that 30 minute YouTube Video about how to do something, then as soon as the video was over, you couldn’t remember a thing? That's largely down to your learning preference.

Some people learn better by watching, some learn better by reading, and others learn better by doing.

But I think the best approach is to combine them all!So let's take a look at the three most widely accepted learning preferences; Visual, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic.

Visual Learners

People who learn visually tend to need to see information to learn it, which can be watching YouTube videos, Udemy courses, and Salesforce Documentation. If you are a visual learner, there are a couple of things that you can do to really enhance your learning and understanding. I use these methods and feel like they really help the information sink in and help me understand the concepts better

1. Take Notes During Videos or Demonstrations - I’m a big believer in taking notes, and I go old school… pen and paper! I find that the act of writing information down rather than typing it into a google doc forces me to take more condensed and relevant notes. When you can type fast, you can pretty much record everything that is being said, that doesn’t help with your understanding. By creating your own written notes in your own words, you record what is important in a relevant and readable way!

2. Make Mind Maps of Concepts - This was a revelation to me. By taking a concept and mapping it out, you can really visualise that concept and all its relevant details. It's a great way to provide a quick top-down view of a concept and to really understand the finer points and how they tie together, what you will tend to find in Salesforce is that some concepts have a lot of similarities which is really visible through these Mind Maps. At Get Force Certified, I have included Cheatsheets, which are a variation of these Mind Maps and provide a quick and easy-to-reference document for each concept.
3. Use Colours - Colours help your notes stand out and make it easier to remember what you see. You can even go as far as colour coding if you feel it will help you remember and internalise that information more. For me, I want all my notes and work to be as visually appealing as possible, and colours help me do that, it means that when I come to look at my notes, I’m not looking at big blocks of boring text. I’m looking at something quite fun, engaging and easy to read.

Auditory Learners

People learn through auditory content, which can be through YouTube videos, Udemy Videos, Podcasts and other audio formats. If you are an auditory learner, you tend to remember what you hear and are pretty good at relaying that back to other people. There are a couple of techniques that you can use to help you study for the Salesforce Administrator Certification Exam;

1. Voice Notes - If you are an auditory learner, then you learn best by listening, so take advantage of this by recording voice notes to listen back to. Whether that is just listening to the audio version of a video or you create a voice note of you reading your written notes, it will really help with your studies when you listen back. The best thing about this approach is that once you have those notes, you have them forever, so you can listen when you want, as often as you want. Great for when you are studying for a Certification and have a planned long drive!

2. Teach Others - This is one of my favourite techniques and really gets to the heart of whether you know your stuff, or you don't. I used this method successfully when studying for my Salesforce Admin Exam, I taught my dog every concept that I was learning! What I found particularly interesting was that I could tell what I wasn’t confident about because my voice had an inflexion at that point, or I couldn’t concisely explain a topic. Ideally, you would have a human study buddy who can listen, give you feedback, and even ask questions to really test your knowledge!

3. Listen to Music When You Study- This helps keep you focused, I wouldn’t recommend listening to anything that is lyric-heavy as it may distract you, I find Deep House to be good to listen to when studying. Because you are stimulated by the sound, your brain will be more engaged, resulting in better knowledge retention.

Kinaestetic Learners

For those who are kinaesthetic learners, you learn best by actually doing something, not watching someone else do it but by getting your hands dirty yourself. Trailhead Trailmixes, Personal Dev Orgs, and instructor lead training are the best resources for you. A few handy study tips for kinaesthetic learners are;

1. Hands-On Experience - I think this is the most impactful study tip of all, regardless of your learning style. It's crucial that you get as much hands-on experience as possible, as this will really emphasise your learning. Reading about concepts and watching videos isn’t enough, you need to actually configure them yourself, and this can be done in Trailhead Playgrounds, Dev Orgs, or Sandboxes. Much like taking notes physically, by carrying out tasks and actions, you will create that connection between abstract concepts and concrete actions and steps. I cannot emphasise how important it is to get hands-on with Salesforce.

2. Post It Notes - If you are struggling to remember the differences between two similar concepts (e.g. Data Import Wizard vs Data Loader), write down the features of each and move them around, making them random and in no order. Then try and put them in the right column under the correct heading. By getting more creative and physically having to match up the concept and the features, you will remember them more.

3. Stand Up and Move Around - If you are a kinaesthetic learner, then you probably move around a lot, use this to your advantage. Listen to a podcast or your audio notes when you are walking or doing some household chores, and watch an Instructional video while you are on the treadmill. Or, if you want to take your learning to the next level, then teach someone the concept while you are sitting next to them working through Trailhead, show them the steps your need to take to set it up and highlight the various features as you run through it.

Apply it to your Study Material

You may be thinking, “all these ideas are great, but where do I start?”

The first thing is to figure out your preferred learning style. You probably already have a strong idea, and if not, think about how you communicate with people. Do you find yourself saying, “I see what you mean”, that's an indication that you are a visual learner. How about “I hear what you are saying”? That could be a sign that you are an auditory learner. Or perhaps you say, “I know how you feel”, you may be a kinaesthetic learner.

There are loads of tests online that you can take to help you figure out your preferred learning style; just google “VAK learning styles self-assessment” and you will have plenty to choose from!

Combining Them The GFC Way!

When designing, developing, and delivering Get Force Certified Courses, I have focused on ensuring that all learning styles are catered for. Not only that, I have purposefully intertwined the learning styles to really turbocharge your speed of learning, your understanding, and your knowledge retention and recall.

There is a concept of “synergy” that I firmly believe in, the idea that a team is more than the sum of all its parts. You could express it mathematically as 1 +1 = 3. Rather than 1 + 1 = 2, it now equals 3, and that's because when you combine the 1’s, they enhance each other and rather than just resulting in 2, you get the increase to 3.

Think about when you cook, when you add a variety of spices and seasonings, they combine to enhance the dish. Far more than if you were to just add one of the spices on their own.

We apply that to your learning.

By combining visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic teaching styles, your learning is massively enhanced as you approach and understand each concept from multiple angles. Here are a 5 examples;

1. HD Annotated Video Lessons - We’ve produced high-quality annotated video lessons where we highlight the key areas we are talking about or selecting. We’ve included full transcripts and accurate closed captions for maximum accessibility, this is also great for when you want to study somewhere where having the sound on isn’t appropriate.

2. Business Use Cases to Follow Along With - To enhance understanding, we apply the concepts to real examples, and we walk you through the steps you need to undertake to fulfil the requirement. If you want to really test yourself, you could pause the video after the Business Use Case Scenario, configure the solution, and then check if what you did what right.

3. Cheatsheets - There are easy-to-use, quick-to-reference cheatsheets that help you understand a topic at a high level. They are colourful and follow the mind map approach meaning you can easily visualise the concept and all of the details quickly. These are great for revision too!

4. Randomised Mock Exams - When taking practice and mock exams, there is the danger of just learning the questions and answers without realising. That is because usually the questions are in the same order, and so are the answers, so you start to remember the pattern of the questions and the answers, not the actual concept. The questions in Get Force Certified practice and mock exams are taken randomly from a weighted question bank, meaning that you get the right number of questions for each section, the same as you can expect on the real Salesforce Certification Exams. To make things a little more difficult we’ve also randomised the order of the answers for the question so there is no pattern that you can learn consciously or subconsciously.

5. Clear Explanations with Screenshots - For each question on the practice exam, we have clear explanations of why your answer was right or wrong, as well as high-resolution screenshots that are annotated to point out the key areas or settings on the image. This approach helps you learn the concepts and topics and you learn why you was right or wrong, not just the answer.

Conclusion

As we’ve explored there are three main types of learning modalities - Visual, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic, and it’s important to understand which is your preferred method so that you can ensure that the time you spend studying is highly effective.

To study in the most effective and efficient way you should combine a mixture of learning styles and that’s what we have done at Get Force Certified. We want to ensure that every minute you spend learning with us is worthwhile and helps you on your Salesforce Journey.

So if you are looking to pass your Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam, or any other Salesforce Certification then take a look at our courses and invest in your study.

Thank you for reading,

Dave