You might have been playing around with Salesforce. You might have it in your business, as a proper CRM tool. Or you might just try to get into the world of Salesforce and start to understand what can I do. You might already have seen a glimpse about the enormous opportunities the system has and all the stuff it can do. So how can I learn more about this and where do I go? Trailhead is the answer.
What is Trailhead?
Trailhead is Salesforce’s free e-learning platform. I think it’s one of the best tools I have ever seen and one of the best build ones. You sign up to it and create your own account. What you then can do, is you can learn on a modular basis. They have things like what they call badges, which is basically a module, which tells you about a certain aspect of Salesforce. It can be very top line for example what do we mean by Fourth Industrial Revolution or how do you deal with stress at a workflow? But it also goes into things like actually how do I create Accounts, how do I modify my look of the system, how can I create things like page layouts. It really does everything and anything that you can do.
The beauty of it is that most badges are a combination of explanation with hands on steps followed by a quiz or making you build solution in a playground. A playground is basically a small org that has pretty much all the vanilla functionality that Salesforce have. These playgrounds you need to work through the badges. But you can also use it for your own advanced learning. Muck around in the playground and try anything. No problem if it breaks, just create a new one.
Trailhead is free!!!
You don’t have to pay Salesforce anything to go into Trailhead and start learning. But, the cost is your time. You know how much time do you have on a daily / weekly / monthly basis to learn. And for Salesforce, there is constantly new functionality coming out. It can become quite tricky managing your time.
The other beauty of Trailhead is, Salesforce is rolling it out to businesses so you can create your own similar learning platform. E-learning of course is becoming more popular especially now so many people are working from home. With the Trailhead platform, you can use their style as in having this modular approach, doing a lot of text and having done some tests at the end of it. A great way to get your people to learn new things.
The challenge with Trailhead is that there are over a thousand badges. They cover anything from starter learner to the very advanced level developer. It is based on gamification as Salesforce tries learning to make fun. The more badges you have the higher rank is. You don’t get anything for it, just your own bragging rights. Sometimes there are challenges that they put out, quests that you can actually go into a pool and win something. For example they give out t-shirts, sometimes they give out certification vouchers.
If you don’t know where to start in Trailhead, look for learning paths (or trails). They help to guide you in a logical order through a learning area. In addition there are different types of badges.
Some are focussed on general learning and have quizzes to check what you read, others require hands-on to complete the badge. And there’s also a range that they call Superbadges which is really about applying your learnings. Those are often linked to like business cases or test cases. They are a whole range of text followed with some questions and you just have to figure out how it’s going to be built and you have to then build it in the system.
The other way Trailhead is really useful is if you want to get certifications, for example Administrator or Developer or any of the others. You will find a lot of your learning within Trailhead so you can dive into the badges and that way not only learn the theory behind things but also doing hands-on experience which is one of the best ways to learn in my opinion.
The big challenge is that constantly new badges coming out, so to stay on top of that can be quite challenging. Especially if you’re a bit competitive. For me it is all about your Learning Journey and we’ll talk about that in one of the other blogpost. You are your own boss, your own guide in this whole process. I have to be honest I don’t use it as much as I want to because I’m just often too busy with work or doing things like creating videos. But I am getting better and dedicating more time in learning new things or cementing my existing knowledge.
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