The month of July saw User Groups across the world join in the Summer of Trailhead. This was a great event to have an excuse to get your hands dirty with Trailhead.
What is Trailhead? Well Trailhead is a new way to learn and test your Salesforce knowledge. It has Trails for both administrators and developers. It’s also not just a bunch of test questions. Trailhead provides you with lots of easy to understand information before it the tests.
What’s really cool about Trailhead is that you actually get to build things in Salesforce and Trailhead will check to see if you were successful. It’s pretty darn nifty.
Get Started with Trailhead
What you need to get started with Trailhead.
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- A developer Salesforce org. You will be building reports, objects, and custom fields in Salesforce. Don’t have a developer org? Go get one at Developer.salesforce.com and click the green sign up.
- Your developer org Username & Password. You need to have a Salesforce login to use Trailhead and you want it to be your developer org. Personally, I like to use a dev org as my Success Community profile so it always goes with me no matter what company I work for.
- Trailhead URL: https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead
That’s it!
Once you login into Trailhead your first step is to pick a module. A module is made up of a series of challenges. Each time you complete a challenge you win points. If you fail a challenge, you can retake it, but the points you receive will be decreased. Once all challenges are completed you earn a badge. Think of it like Salesforce Scouts, except we don’t have a shirt of sash to sow real badges on (more on that in a moment).
As of August 5, here are the modules available in Trailhead:
- Admin Trail – Beginner
- Admin Trail – CRM
- Developer Trail – Beginner
- Adnin Trail – Intermediate
- Developer Trail – Intermediate
- Developer Trail – Mobile SDK
- Dreamforce Trail
If you want to dip your toe in the water, start with the Dreamforce Trail. Not only does it contain a lot of good tips on how to prepare for Dreamforce 2015, but the challenges are fairly straight forward and easy. It’s a nice way to get familiar with how Trailhead works before you dive into one of the other modules.
Conclusion
I want to thank Salesforce for Trailhead. It’s becoming one of my top resources to recommend when people ask how to get started with Salesforce. It’s a great place to learn and prepare to take those certification exams. In particular, I want thank Chris Duarte the Managing Editor at Trailhead. I personally think Salesforce should double down and create the Salesforce scouts. I’m hoping for REAL badges that we can display proudly on our shirts or maybe a sash. So I want you, my loyal readers, to tweet to @TheChrisDuarte and tell her you want real badges for Trailhead! Tell her the Wizard sent you 🙂
