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What Skills Transfer Well Into a Salesforce Admin Career?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company.
Join us as we chat about how he got into the ecosystem and what skills transfer well into a Salesforce Admin career.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.
Transitioning into a Salesforce Admin careerYou might recognize David from his Dreamforce presentation about resolving Flow errors, or our episode about it on the podcast. However, one thing that came up was his career pivot from finance to being a Salesforce Admin, and I wanted to bring him back to talk more about it.
To make a long story short, David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. That job involves a lot of reporting and, somewhere along the way, he realized that running the reports was the most exciting part of the job for him.
David decided to make a career change and focus on Salesforce. But that meant he needed to go on the hunt and figure out how to land his first full-time Salesforce role.
What to look for in job descriptionsDavid's comfort with data, spreadsheets, and reconciliation gave him a strong analytical foundation for making the shift. These skills made it easier to understand how reporting, data cleanliness, and business processes translated to what admins build on the platform.
However, having the right skills is only part of the story—he still needed to find the right jobs to apply to. "It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things," David says, "but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work."
In general, David's advice is to narrow things down for yourself. Look for organizations that are already committed to Salesforce, and job postings that are looking for the admin skillset instead of somebody who can do it all.
A problem-solving mindset and curiosity fuel the admin journeyFor David, the skill that transfers best into a Salesforce Admin career is curiosity. When he was starting out, he was only interested in learning things that would be immediately applicable to the task at hand.
Looking back on it now, David realizes he could have learned much faster if he had indulged his curiosity. "I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt," he says, "and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things."
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from David about how he transferred his skills into a Salesforce Admin career. And make sure you're subscribed to the show to catch us every Thursday.
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Published on 4 days, 10 hours ago