Trailhead awesomeness continues..

Trailhead got a major release recently, its now having 30 modules, 7 trails, and 6 projects. I am pretty happy to see Trailhead evolving, its a huge help and time saver for my company, we revamped our training program and its 100% based out of Trailhead only now. Thus we decided to share the same in recent “Summer of Trailhead” meetup with other experienced and aspiring developers.

How me and my company is leveraging trailhead ? 

Before Trailhead, here is how we are training our team on Salesforce

1. An extensive 2 weeks training programme

2. Which is driven by an Architect or Sr. developer.

3. Classroom style training via PPT slides and white boards.

4. Follow up assignments for each unit. 

This was going well, and we trained our developers well.

But here are key challenges we faced:

1. Tough to keep slides and learning path updated and match the pace of platform changes.

2. No gamification, its fun to see excitement around, when a module is completed, you earn badges and points. 

3. Class room training and ensuring correctness of assignments takes a decent daily time investment.

4. Tough to bifurcate based on Admin and developer roles, by picking right trails.

What are we doing now ?

1. Developers are given a kick off session on Salesforce on day 1, which makes them comfortable with various important landing pages, and most importantly trailhead.

2. Developers start completing trails and exercises in the same.

3. A small follow up session is done daily to discuss progress, doubts and queries. 

4. Finishing developer trails, is close to getting prepared for Salesforce developer certification, which is an added advantage. 

We are very pleased with results and our internal feedback about Trailhead, thus we decided to present in Summer of trailheads meetup with a few new hires, who are actually learning Salesforce using Trailhead, we shared our experiences and tried to answer questions related to the same.

Here are our slides for the meetup:

Shaping up for “SFDC Development” with Trailhead from Abhinav Gupta

What’s new at Trailhead ? 

Changes are across many modules, but here are highlights:

1. Admin Trail

As name suggests this trail is good for admins, but its highly recommended for developers to make sure they understand CRM basics, like Sales cycles using Leads, Opps and Accounts etc.

2. Dreamforce Trail

Dreamforce is a mega event, which is too much to handle without any planning. This trail is specially good for first timers to Dreamforce, its a well organised content to make sure your dreamforce experience is awesome, it covers both basics and key parts to form a good strategy to make most out of dreamforce.

– Basics: extra bags for goodies, chargers, staying hydrated, shoes and how much you need to walk (might be run) around 🙂 

–  Sessions, keynotes, what is where ?

3. Event Monitoring Trail

This gives you a chance to explore a very interesting API first feature.  Event Log files expose very interesting details about how your org is behaving on following key points.

• Logins

• Logouts

• URI (web clicks)

• UI (mobile clicks)

• Visualforce page loads

• API calls

• Apex executions

• Report exports

This trail explains how you can make most out of your event log files, using Salesforce workbench, and visualise them for own use. This was something new for me too, and interesting to explore as well, highly recommended to both admins and developers.

4. New Badges

There are few new bages to win, which are always good to show off internally on your company’s slack, yammer, chatter etc, and to WWW on social media 🙂