We are proud and honoured to have Paul Daly on our team at Zumzum, who is coming up to celebrate his tenth year with us. Not only has Paul nearly a decade of experience assisting businesses to transform the way they work by adopting cloud technology. Paul also has a really interesting career history which has brought him multiple cloud certifications from Google and Salesforce. 

As a top team player and a customer services rock star, we’ve asked Paul to share a little about his journey to Cloud Computing. 

Tell Us About Your Journey To The Cloud, Paul. 

I grew up in Manchester around the inner city areas of between Ardwick and Salford. Neither of which is ideal to raise a family in, but I enjoyed growing up in these places. Life was not always easy from getting in fights regularly as well as the wrong crowd and a petty life of taking drugs and dealing amongst other crimes.

I was not the easiest child to deal with then, when I left primary school, I went to a very hard school where they put people who did very bad things where violence was an everyday occurance and very much a place of kill or be killed it felt like most days.

Despite my flaws and surroundings. I spent the next years weaning myself slowly away from the wrong people I knew were never going to see a good beginning or end throughout their lives. And I was always into computers and technology as far back as the 1980s and my cousin gave away his Atari 800XL to me which was my first ever computer I owned as we could never afford to buy one at the time.

I always wanted to pursue a career in this field, so I enrolled in a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) in Personal Computing maintenance in the mid to late 1990s.

After gaining my NVQ qualification, I anticipated that networking was going to be the next big thing, so I enrolled on a 2 year course studying Cisco networking. My final qualification would be towards a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certificate.

How Did You Begin Your Career In The Technology Industry? 

During my CCNA course, I met a guy in my class who was a networking manager at a local manufacturing company, who offered me a full time role in IT.  After 6 years here, I then went on to manage an IT company elsewhere for 2 years, which unfortunately,went into liquidation. Only a few days after being made redundant, I got a call for an interview at Zumzum and where I accepted a role as a Google Apps deployment specialist which involved data migrations and resolving technical issues. This is where Salesforce comes in.I begin using Salesforce  to log and resolve technical issues and manage data migration projects. I was just a Salesforce end user then.

When I acquired my Google Certified Deployment Specialist and Google G Suite Certified Administrator certifications. I was then offered an opportunity to become more involved in administering and developing our Salesforce system for internal users and for our customers and eventually preparing to shoot for my Salesforce Certified Administrator exam.

How Did You Become A Salesforce Certified Administrator?

I registered with Trailhead which has all the training for all aspects of Salesforce there is to learn and a wholeTrailhead Trailmix on preparing you for your Salesforce exam. There are many badges to do on the Trailhead Trailmix however there are other which you shouldearch for so you can and study and practice the skills that are most relevant to your goals.I also have a sandbox, scratch orgs and  trailhead orgs which  are good for testing and even breaking 🙂

I did the Salesforce practice exams and online quizlets. The quizlets give you 100s of practice questions. They are perfectly legitimate and do not contain any real exam questions, so they are definitely a great way to practice for exams. 

As a way of trying some different learning techniques, I registered for a Trailhead Virtual Bootcamp for New Admins  which was six weeks long. The boot camp narrows things down to a smaller scale towards your exam, whereas the Trailhead is much wider .Fortunately, I passed my certification before the end of the bootcamp.

Study, study, study and then do the practice exams first. I would recommend the bootcamp if you fail your exam a few times (Like I did!) :(. It’s much smaller than the Trailhead Trailmix and more focused towards tactics to pass your Salesforce Certified Administrator certification.

I failed my exam 3 times because I was too focused on what the exam wanted me to answer in the questions I didn’t know, rather than what would make sense if I was really stuck in that situation. I would say. If you don’t know a question in your exam at all. Think of the answer being what would be the most sensible approach to do in the real world and not the most technical.

What Do You Think Will Be The Most Exciting Technologies For You In The Future Paul ?

I would have to say Robots with unlimited potential and AI and 3d printers which are finally able to print metal materials. I currently use one making plastic.