jagmohan-singh

Jagmohan Singh

for-developers

For Developers

# Tips for Becoming a Salesforce Developer

Interested in becoming a Salesforce developer? In this blog post Jagmohan has put together his favorite tips and resources to get started in the world of Salesforce development.

## Pre-Requisites

These skills are strongly recommended for anyone who wants to become a
developer. If you don’t think you have some of these skills, you can
still be a developer, but you may want to develop them in addition to
the other items below, or you may struggle with your job. Even after you
become a developer, these should be continuously improved.

1. **Analytical and Problem-Solving Skills**: These include the ability
 to visualize problems and their complexity and devise logical
 solutions. These skills help professionals effectively understand
 their clients' needs and suggest optimal solutions.

2. **Effective Communication**: The ability to communicate effectively
 to share, receive, and process information. These skills help
 professionals communicate with colleagues and customers both orally
 and in writing.

3. **Time Management**: It is important to effectively manage your time
 when working on multiple tasks for one customer or multiple projects
 for different clients. You might get overwhelmed when people keep
 asking you to do more.

## Learn Salesforce Administration Basics

As a developer at a large company with administrators on your team, you
*might* get away with knowing only the developer tools. Still, most
Salesforce developers will need to know how to perform basic
administrative tasks in order to develop on the platform.

1. **Learn about the Salesforce Platform:** Familiarize yourself with
 the Salesforce platform and its various products, such as Sales
 Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.
 Understand the basics of cloud computing, CRM concepts, and
 Salesforce terminology. This is a great time to consider where you
 might want to specialize. Some developers learn multiple clouds, but
 as a new developer, you’ll want to focus on a certain area.

2. **Become a Certified Administrator:** There are lots of
 configuration / declarative options available in the Salesforce
 platform before you need any customization. Even when you have
 decided that you need some customization, you still need to know how
 it will coexist with the other automation in Salesforce, for
 example, how to call a Flow from Apex and the other way around, add
 a Lightning Web Component to a record page, make a decision between
 a Screen Flow and LWC, and so on. All this comes with an overall
 understanding of the Salesforce platform and the various declarative
 tools available in the platform. You can refer to [this post on
 how to become a Salesforce
 Administrator](https://cloudanswers.com/blog/tips-for-becoming-a-salesforce-admin)
 for tips on what to study.

3. **Adopt the Salesforce platform in your daily life:** Once you are
 in the Salesforce ecosystem, navigating and customizing the
 Salesforce platform should start to come naturally to you. And to
 become better at it, one approach you can adopt is to start using
 Salesforce in your daily life. You could build a habit tracker app
 to improve your fitness or self-learning, an expense tracker app to
 manage your finances, a vehicle maintenance app to maintain records
 of your vehicle’s service/repair appointments, etc. You can make use
 of workflow rules, flows, etc, to create follow-up appointments,
 send reminders, etc. This is a great way to practice the skills you
 are learning and make sure you can actually deliver a complete
 solution.

## Programming Skills

To be a Salesforce developer, you must have basic programming skills.
These skills remain common for most programming languages and can be
re-applied while learning any new programming language. You could
benefit from having some prior knowledge of the following concepts.
These are not required but will definitely help you become a better
programmer.

1. **Data Structures**: You should learn how various data structure
 constructs, such as arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, maps,
 sets, trees, and graphs, work and be able to use them in
 programming.

2. **Object-Oriented Programming Concepts**: The OOP principles, such
 as classes, objects, polymorphism, inheritance, overloading and
 overriding, etc., essentially remain the same across any programming
 language that supports Object-Oriented Programming.

3. **Algorithms and Design Patterns**: The ability to write effective
 programming that optimizes time (CPU) and space (Memory) utilization
 helps you write software that performs better and scales
 efficiently.

## Use Trailhead and Get Platform Developer I Certification

Use the [Prepare for Your Salesforce Platform Developer I
Credential](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/users/strailhead/trailmixes/prepare-for-your-salesforce-platform-developer-i-credential)
to study and learn important concepts related to Salesforce development. There is a huge
difference between getting certified and having the ability to build and
deliver real-world projects. But take this as a step in your journey
towards becoming a Salesforce developer and display your tenacity to see
it through.

## Learn to Use Generative AI Effectively

[ChatGPT](https://chat.openai.com/) and similar tools can be of
great help when learning anything. You just need to ask the right
questions and write good prompts to get the information you are looking
for. We don’t recommend using this to write code when you are starting
out; use it to learn and understand the concepts when stuck on
understanding something. If you use it to write code, ensure you
understand what the code is doing; you can even ask it questions about
the code.

You can also install the [Einstein for Developers plugin for VS
Code](https://developer.salesforce.com/tools/vscode/en/einstein/einstein-overview)
or [GitHub
Copilot](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/overview) and
begin learning some of the Generative AI tools that can be used within
your Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The Salesforce tools are
not as advanced as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot, but they are trained
exclusively on Salesforce code and have stricter privacy practices, so
as their models evolve they may end up being the best solution.

## Do Not Stop: Practice, Practice, and Some More Practice

You should continue to practice by building personal projects, taking on
freelance opportunities, volunteering for non-profit organizations,
contributing to open source projects, starting a blog, and building a
portfolio website/resume, etc. All this will help you improve your
skills and build a network of connections from which new opportunities
will come your way.

## Learn Git

Git allows developers to work on projects locally, enabling them to make
changes, commit them, and track history without needing constant access
to a central server. It provides robust version control capabilities,
allowing developers to track changes to files over time.

Git facilitates collaboration among developers by providing tools for
sharing code, reviewing changes, and resolving conflicts. Features like
pull requests allow developers to propose changes, discuss them, and
incorporate feedback before merging them into the main codebase. This
fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and code quality improvement.

To learn Git, we recommend the [Pro Git
book](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2), available online completely
free and translated into over a dozen languages. Once you understand the
basics of Git, you can learn [how to use Git within VS
Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/sourcecontrol/overview),
Salesforce’s recommended IDE.

## Get Involved in the Community

Salesforce has a great community behind it, and there are various kinds
of community coordination going on all around the world, such as [Trailblazer
community groups](https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/),
[Slack teams](https://www.salesforceben.com/7-salesforce-slack-communities-to-join/),
Salesforce Stackexchange, local meetups, etc. Find out more about these
and try to reach out to Salesforce professionals to build your connections
in the Salesforce ecosystem.

## Conclusion

Salesforce is an exceptional platform that offers great opportunities to
build successful careers. Once you understand the basic concepts,
demonstrate your ability to learn new concepts, and have a passion for
technology, there is no one stopping you from landing your dream job in
the Salesforce ecosystem. We hope this post helps you achieve your goals
as a Salesforce developer.

## Downloadable Guide

Want this in a convenient PDF format for reference? Download the tips for becoming a Salesforce developer guide:

[![Screenshot of guide](/uploads/tips-for-becoming-sf-dev-guide-thumbnail.png)](</uploads/Tips for Becoming a Salesforce Developer.pdf>)

Interested in becoming a Salesforce developer? In this blog post Jagmohan has put together his favorite tips and resources to get started in the world of Salesforce development.

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Tips for Becoming a Salesforce Developer

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