Now, I want you to familiarize yourself with the job descriptions available to you after your admin career. This trio, namely business analyst, consultant, and developer, will help you understand which direction your career might go in. This team is a bit like the characters in Diablo – each has special properties and abilities. Here are our heroes:
- The business analyst (BA) works a bit like a detective. Of course, we are not talking about finding an art thief or a hacker on the UN’s servers. We are talking about someone who perfectly understands the client’s business and identifies areas where the business can be improved. The BA works at the intersection of business and IT. They are a bridge between the two worlds of user needs and the technical possibilities of Salesforce. Thanks to their analysis, they can easily draw strategic conclusions from the data, which will help the company modernize its solutions and introduce them to the ever-changing market.
- The consultant is like a digital Indiana Jones. They traverse different industries, from which they gather experience and best practices. Their task is to advise on how the system can be used most effectively to achieve the desired goals for the client. It is the consultant who proposes certain solutions because, knowing the system, they can suggest specific solutions. Therefore, when a new project starts, the consultant leads, among other things, discovery workshops, during which they ask many questions and from the answers build the system and solutions, structure, and functionalities. With deep specialist knowledge, they can adapt to a specific environment. The consultant is a kind of guide who takes the company by the hand and walks it through the landscape of objects and records, asking about business needs to finally reach a well-tailored system. What do they do in Salesforce? They translate the client’s words into Salesforce language and then work on the system’s design.
- The developer is a magician of code. In cooperation with the consultant and BA, they can create applications and solutions. The developer can build simple websites as well as complicated IT systems. They mainly follow logic and use programming languages. They are also a bit like an architect and builder in one, as they shape reality in software. What do they do in Salesforce? They build components, processes, triggers, and many other brilliant solutions. This person is technical.
Choosing your future path is a bit like choosing your studies: you may not know what you want to do until the end and then pick something at random (I have a background in physiotherapy and cultural studies). But remember, your choices are not forever. If one day you decide it would be cooler to be a developer instead of a consultant, trust me – the road is open. Working in the Salesforce world, you can easily switch industries. Many people working in the industry started from the simplest tasks, which were repetitive, but through them, they learned a lot about the system and its use. They learned how to navigate it freely and use that freedom in their work.
I’m not speaking only from my perspective – I have also asked other people working in the Salesforce ecosystem for their feedback on how they started their careers and for their golden advice:
- The first one is Piotr Dziedzic, solution architect and Head of Salesforce Consulting. He is a specialist with vast experience and 20 certificates and is generally a Salesforce enthusiast. Here is what he wanted to convey to you: