Being a Certified Force.com Developer

Under the title of New year? - New Salesforce Certificate!, our first developer meetup of 2014 happened on the 8th of January at The Llandoger Trow pub, in Bristol (UK). The group meetups have been going on every other month since October 2012, giving developers around the South West of England the opportunity to gather and chat about Salesforce development.

The theme of the meetup in this occasion was Certification; at Desynit we have made our new years resolutions, and we are planning on getting our "Force.com Developer" and "Force.com Advanced Developer" certifications; hence the meetup.

Attendees chatting at the meetup

My colleague Simon created a really good presentation about getting Certified as a "Force.com Developer", in which I contributed with my own experience on preparing for the test and all the certification process. You can find a really good explanation of the Force.com Developer certification on his blog, from prices and training available to the duration of the test and format of the questions.

This is the presentation with all the slides we presented at the meetup.

Becoming a Salesforce certified developer from Simon Lawrence

Achieving the "Force.com Developer" certification was one of my objectives for the year after my annual review at Desynit, so I could get more involvement with Salesforce.com projects in the company.

When I took my "Force.com Developer" certification test I had been working on the platform for about 6 months. I had been developing on projects, involving object and field creation, some workflow and validation rules, some Visualforce and Apex triggers, and so forth. My experience had been with quite a few of the features of the Salesforce.com platform, having used both the point and click approach and some hands-on coding; this was enough to go for it.

The first thing I did as part of my preparation for the test was to go through the Force.com Workbook, which goes through the creation of a basic Warehouse application. By following this tutorial you are exposed to most of the aspects of the Salesforce.com platform; creation of an app, the required objects and fields, some business logic and some user interface customisation. It is a really good starting point as it explains the basics of the platform without going very deeply into details.

After the workbook I started the Force.com Fundamentals book, which is a much more in-depth guide to all of the features available in the Salesforce.com platform, and it is the main reference when it comes to the preparation of the "Force.com Developer" certification. This book also goes through the creation of an application, explaining all the steps in the process with a lot more details than the workbook. My main focus on this book was the Security and the Reporting sections, as they represent quite a big portion of the overall exam, and I hadn't had that much exposure to them on my day-to-day work.

Me presenting my slide

My last suggestion with regards to preparing for the "Force.com Developer" exam would be to have a look at the Study Guide, that can be found here, and gives a full outline of the exam and the weight of each section on the test. I would also recommend having a look at audit fields, multi-currency and encrypted fields, because these are not covered in the Fundamentals book and there are always a couple of questions about them in the exam.

After our presentation, my colleague Chris gave another presentation with his experience on getting the "Force.com Advanced Developer" certification, so if you are already a certified developer, have a look at his blog post and check what else it takes to become a "Force.com Advanced Developer", I'm already working on it, as I'm planning to get the Advanced certification by the end of the year.

If you are thinking about why we do this meetups and would like to join us, here are some of the reasons why you should join our Salesforce Developer User Group, so give it a go and sign up for the next event!