First of all, I’ll give this credit to the great brains that make it possible for us to use High-Tech technologies to serve all of humanity. Those great brains may include mathematicians or other scientists. As a result of the great work, the Internet is a great tool to learn state of the art technologies. I always found the internet a great helper to increase my vision.

Blazing Trails with Trailhead

I first joined Trailhead in March 2017, which was soon after joining Zumzum. I had been aware of Salesforce Trailhead previously, however, I had only really dabbled with the earning of badges previously.  For various reasons, I decided to start with a fresh new Trailhead account to earn all my new shiny badges.

It was my direct line manager who encouraged me to use Trailhead more as a learning platform and also as another means to connect with the Salesforce Community. Zumzum uses the Salesforce AppExchange app Trailhead Tracker, so I was very happy that we could both track and measure my progress in our own internal Salesforce org. There is a great dashboard in the Trailhead Tracker app so we could see how many badges I had assigned to me, those I had completed and compare my progress with colleagues on the leaderboards.

During our weekly 1-2-1 meetings, my manager and I would agree badges, trails, modules or trail mixes that would assist me to learn new knowledge to complete work tasks on projects I was assigned to. Not only was there a great alignment between my job and the course content, I soon found Trailhead really is a “Fun way to learn Salesforce”. The course content is really well organised and helped me speed up my learning process. I found myself really well motivated to achieve the targets in front of me, easier to track and monitor and soon found myself rising to the top of most of the leaderboards on Trailhead Tracker.

Trailhead as an agile learning platform.

I found Trailhead very addictive and soon found myself earning trailhead badges during my spare hours in the evenings or at weekends. In fact, I believe that Trailhead learning is an extremely agile learning practice, so that I may learn just what I need, when I need it and apply it to get work done. If I needed to pull out a new feature or learn about the latest and greatest in Salesforce, to apply this to a custom project, I could go earn the Trailhead badge and literally in a few minutes, apply the new skill to a current work item.  Of course, for some of the more complex and tricky skills, I love the fact that Salesforce also provides Trailhead Playgrounds or allow me to connect my own developer orgs to prove that I am able to apply the skills, rather than just understand the concept. Earning Trailhead badges has helped me to be more agile in my own learning, and also more agile in delivering customer projects. So, the full marks given to Salesforce for this offer.

Using Trailhead to earn my Salesforce Certifications

Although I had many years of experience with Salesforce, I had yet to complete my Salesforce certifications. That was something I wanted to achieve to demonstrate my skills in the Salesforce community and part of the reason I joined Zumzum, as they had agreed to help me become certified.  My usage of Trailhead accelerated when I identified various Trailmixes that would allow me to learn the skills and earn my badges towards my Salesforce Certified Administrator exam. I felt super confident as the number of badges I earned built up on my profile giving me the boost I need to go for, and I am pleased to say, pass my Salesforce Certified Administrator exam.  That moment just carried me through to also achieving in a few months my second Salesforce Certification, the Salesforce Platform Developer I. I’ve already planned more learning on Trailhead to be able to complete even more certifications.

As Salesforce continues to add new functionality to it’s core products and widen the product portfolio, Trailhead continues to expand its content to education the Salesforce developers, administrators and users. So it’s looks like Trailhead is a gigantic platform to learn, covering the latest technologies, hence, I always feel proud to learn the best material in the world.  Salesforce has already announced that Salesforce Certification Maintenance Exams will be moving to Trailhead and I do look forward to yet more exciting new innovations.

Trailhead is the perfect tool to help all those in my local community learn Salesforce

Once I had achieved my personal goals of gaining badges, Salesforce Certifications and reaching the Trailhead Ranger status, I decided it was time to start giving back to my local community. Trailhead is the perfect tool to help all those in my local community that wish to develop an IT career and get started with Salesforce.  I already have a friend that I am teaching Salesforce to by using the same Trailhead Trailmixes I used myself. This means I am able to easily share my knowledge and help others at quite a rapid pace.

Waseem Lodhi is a Senior Salesforce Developer at Zumzum, gaining his Masters Degree in Computer Science from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore. Already with over 5 years Salesforce experience, Waseem is helping organisations transform work be embrace new applications. Connect with Waseem on Twitter and LinkedIn.