In order to be seen as a respected company/tool you of course have to provide training and certifications to the community.

• Salesforce.com offers currently 5 certifications;
• Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
• Salesforce.com Certified Advanced Administrator
• Salesforce.com Certified Developer
• Salesforce.com Certified Advanced Developer
• Salesforce.com Consultant

The certified administrator certification is required for the advanced administrator certification and the consultant certification. The certified developer certification is required for the advanced developer certification.

Why should I become cloud certified?

Being certified means that you have proven you have the proper skills, at least theoretically. Besides this basis there is more to being a Salesforce.com Certified Consultant. This proves you have certain knowledge of the tool. Don’t forget that when you will be implementing Salesforce.com at 1 of your customers you will also have to do to requirements workshops, business process management, probably some project management and business change management because every where something changes you will have resistance to this change.

What do the tests look like?

Well, I can guarantee you that if you have no experience working with Salesforce.com you will fail your test. The lack of experience can be compensated by taking the proper exam prep trainings, however if you have never worked with the tool before you will have a hard time doing the test.

All tests are 1,5 hours and about 60 to 70 multiple choice questions, depending on the test you are taking. Salesforce.com has given the term multiple choices a new meaning. It’s not only questions with 4 answers as radio buttons to choose from. They also have some questions in there like select all that apply giving you 8 different answers as a checkbox. What I have never seen before in a certification test is the type of questions with 4 propositions and 4 answers as a drop down box where you have to put the right ones together. These questions are actually 4 questions in 1.

The exam is of course hosted in the cloud meaning that you will login to a website, answer the questions and hit the submit button. The results of your test will be presented immediately to you after hitting the submit button (do not hit this button before you are finished). You will not get an overview of you score but only the message “Passed” or “Fail” ( since I have not failed a Salesforce.com test before I am guessing here ;-P)

More information

More information on trainings you can find here: http://cloud-consulting.nl/en/Products-Services-Solutions/Services/training.html

More about the certification program you can find here: http://www.salesforce.com/uk/services-training/training_certification/certification/