You’re now a certified Salesforce professional – well done! Maybe you have one certification or ten, either way – it doesn’t stop there! You always need to keep learning in Salesforce. Why, you might wonder? Well, Salesforce isn’t the No.1 implemented CRM system for no reason. The company keep updating its platform on regular basis to suit its customer’s needs and wishes and for constant improvement. As a cloud-based solution, the update of the Salesforce.org platform affects all clients and all Salesforce certified professionals. This means, that you need to keep learning and keep your certifications active and up to date. Want to know how? This is how you do it!
In order to have your certifications active, you need to do your maintenance exams – and this goes for all the different certifications you currently hold. The normal “Consultant”, such as the Certified New Administrator exams are written three times a year; Winter, Spring and Summer. Luckily the Salesforce Certified Administrator, Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator, Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant, Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant and Salesforce Certified Community Cloud Consultant are an all-in-one exam. This goes for the Developer Certifications too, where you have more than one certification in the same maintenance exam.
The more specific, expert certifications such as Marketing Cloud Email Specialist and Pardot Specialist are written once a year. In previous years, we have seen some expert certifications being written more than once a year because of new releases within the platform. The current fee for the maintenance exams is $100 for each, so if you need to do say, both the Certified New Admin and Marketing Cloud Specialist exam, you will need to pay $400 for the whole year.
It might seem a lot of money for an x8 Certified Salesforce Consultant but it is important that you keep your certifications active and up to date. Your certification is your strongest asset in showing your customer and users that you know what you are talking about (especially when working for a client that might not know a lot of the Salesforce system in detail). Keeping your certifications active via the maintenance exams will put you in a higher position among the competition too, as they may have inactive or indeed no certifications and most clients today value and require a certification. Additionally, some companies will also pay out bonuses for each active certification when they are hiring – this will be able to make up for all that cash spent on those maintenance exams!
Feel free to contact K2 University for more advice.
