My goal in January 2010 is to become a Salesforce.com Certified Developer. This would be my 3rd certification and, in my opinion, the most important one moving forward. I am using the DEV-401 podcasts, my developer cookbook, and the online study guide. There are also some blogs that were recommended to me – ForceCertified.com is great and written by @johncoppedge (who also has a admin study guide)!
Certified Administrator – I took this exam a month before Dreamforce 2008. I wanted to pass it so I could recieve the special treatment that it came with! I thought the exam was fairly straight forward and easy. I had been my company’s Salesforce admin for about a year and a power user for 2 years. We use PE so I had to study and learn things in theory and apply them in my dev. org. If you are have not taken this exam but are an admin and a Salesforce.com evangelist – I would look into it, study for, and take it.
Certified Consultant – I took this exam the day Dreamforce 2009 started after taking CON-201 the previous 2 days. There are parts of this exam that make perfect sense; eg. “Should you involve the VP of Marketing when talking about Campaigns?” Other parts are a bit more difficult. I found most of my trouble to be around the Service and Support. I do not use that functionality in my everyday work and I had to learn some best practices as well as learning how to determine the need for and implement the Service Cloud. I feel that most admins are already consulting for their own organizations, data gathering, managing expectations, selling new functionality internally, then I would look into it, study for, and take it.
If you have any questions, please let me know. I am more than happy to talk about this with you!
