Salesforce Trailhead’s mission is to provide current and prospective customers with admins and developers. Growing that talent pool is crucial to Salesforce’s health.
Salesforce customers need help to use Salesforce. It takes self-trained, motivated admins, developers and consultants to plug the Salesforce platform into a company’s operations. If it’s a successful implementation, it takes even more talent to scale up as the Salesforce customer’s business grows.
On its present growth trajectory in the wake of acquiring Tableau and MuleSoft, Salesforce will need to persuade triple the current number of these independent experts to join its tribe in the next decade. The number could end up being even higher, considering Salesforce customers like Heidi Melin, CMO of cloud office collaboration and project management provider Workfront, say they already see Salesforce admins and developers in short supply.
“Salesforce is at a place from a scale and a breadth perspective that they should – and probably are – turning up their Trailblazer efforts,” said Melin, who added that many cloud software companies, including Workfront, need more skilled ambassadors to integrate their applications into their customers’ workflow to enable success. “The more people that are trained and are ready to use Salesforce, the higher propensity to influence their customers’ technology choices.”
The genesis of Salesforce Trailblazers
Considering Salesforce just passed its 20th anniversary, Trailhead is relatively new, given that it debuted in 2014. New training videos and a mobile app were among the upgrades highlighted at its Dreamforce conference last month.
Sarah Franklin, executive vice president and general manager of platform, Trailhead and developers at Salesforce, helped create Trailhead from scratch. The idea, she said, was to make the training accessible and consumable by anyone, anywhere. That requires plain language, free of jargon, as well as making content renderable for people with disabilities. She said she wants everyone who wants to be a Salesforce Trailblazer — Salesforce’s word for customers and Trailhead learners — to join the community.
More than 1.7 million Salesforce Trailblazers have earned more than 17.5 million badges, according to the company, with 25% of Trailhead users indicating in a recent IDC report that a badge earned them a new job. Career site Indeed.com said job postings for Salesforce developers increased 129% from 2018 to 2019.
Salesforce Trailblazer roadmap: No-cost bachelor’s degrees
Over the next decade, Franklin’s setting her sights on making Trailhead a venue where users can earn a free bachelor’s degree. It must be fully accredited, she said, because accreditation is “the one thing employers have from our government to filter out applicants from skilled labor positions.”
If her team is successful in doing that, it will give Trailhead a flashy tool to recruit more admins and developers to keep up with market demand and help lay a foundation for the future of Salesforce.
