In my years of experience in Salesforce one of the most frequently asked questions (other than how to spell Ignacio or why people call me Nacho) has always been the background and skills needed to become a Salesforce developer, and there isn’t a unique answer for that question. As a Salesforce developer in your career you may face many different situations depending on your role, it is obvious that being a developer you need some coding background but as your career progresses your coding skills may not be as important as a good understanding of the cloud ecosystem.
One of the things I’ve learnt is that not every Salesforce developer wants to have the same career path, some prefer coding, others designing solutions and client-facing. So if you are one of these cases or you want to start as a Salesforce developer, here are some of the skills you need for your career progression.
Developer. A developer needs a good coding background. You will need to understand Object-Oriented Programming and Database basics and learn Salesforce native programming languages. Apex, a back-end Java based language, Visualforce to build HTML like pages and Aura, a Javascript framework used for Lightning components.
Senior Developer. As a Senior Developer you will need to have a strong knowledge of Salesforce and its programming languages as well as good understanding of integration techniques, ETL (Extract Transform Load) and Continuous Integration tools.
Technical Consultant. A developer with good client-facing skills, that is able to gather requirements and translate them into Salesforce configuration and code. You will also need the same skills as a Senior Developer but you will definitely have less time to code.
Technical Lead. A development team leader, capable of running DevOps and with good understanding of project management tools.
Technical Architect. The technical reference for both the team and the client, a person with great knowledge of Salesforce and other cloud based products, data management and integrations. Responsible of designing the final solution and with great skills in risk acknowledgement.
Certified Technical Architect. A Salesforce guru, a person that has completed successfully the Salesforce Technical Architect review board and knows the ins and outs of every Salesforce feature.
From my experience, these roles may overlap depending on the project, company and team size, so as a techie you need to expect the unexpected, from creating a simple Apex trigger to programming the beautiful mind of Sidbot!
Nacho is employed by makepositive as a Technical Consultant with four years experience in Salesforce. Nacho is currently training to become a Technical Architect through the makepositive TA academy.
