Tips for Salesforce Exams Part 1 – Studying

Salesforce certification exams are a fact of life for many of us in the eco system. Whether you are a consultant who needs to add at least one a year or taking your first exam it’s important to have a plan for how you approach your next test. Getting through Salesforce Exams generally requires a mix of memorization, understanding key concepts, and good test taking skills.

Currently I hold 13 Salesforce certifications and have survived 12 exams to get there (there are a couple two-for-ones to be had among the Architect exams) and I passed all but one on the first try. This is by no means makes me exceptional – my current manager holds somewhere between 35-40 certifications, I lost track a test or two ago – but it does mean I’ve taken enough to develop a routine that works pretty well.

What I’m offering here is an outline to what I do. From talking with friends who have mimicked my routine it seems to work well for others as well.

I should note: I am not a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA). This guide is not meant to help you pass the CTA exam or project, although it should help you with everything that comes in earlier phases of that journey. If I ever decide to put myself through the CTA process, I expect I’ll write a bit about that process, but in the meantime I’m not qualified to speak to it. I am also not currently on an exam advisory panel – take the exams not write them.

Choosing a Salesforce Exam

Before you can study for an exam, you need to decide which one you’re taking. You want to study for the right exam after-all. When picking exams there are many considerations, but let me dispel a couple myths:

There is no one exam that will land you a job. Certification is useful, and for some jobs essential, but employers are looking for more than just certification. So a specific certification might help, but it’s not enough by itself.
There is no one path through the collection of certifications. I think historically there might have been a reasonable path through the certifications that made default sense. But at last count there were more than 40 certifications out there. Salesforce adds several a year.

You need to figure out what certification benefits you the most. The benefit could be helping improve you resume. It could be helping your employer land new deals (but make sure they give you tangible credit for helping land those deals). Sometimes your employer told you have to take one this year and just need a pass.

Salesforce Exam Career Tracks

Salesforce organizes certifications by career track. There are exams for admins, developers, consultants, architects, and more. You don’t need to confine yourself to any one of those areas – I have certifications from four categories. The career track the exam is aimed at helps you understand the kind of information you can expect and it’s level of complexity. But you should not use it as your sole guidance.

Administrators are expected to know how to do the work of setting up Salesforce, so the questions are focused on which settings enable which features.

Architects are expected to make strategic decisions about which features to use, so the questions are focused on understanding the when to use a feature based on its technical characteristics. Consultant exams are similarly focused on when to recommend features, but are generally easier that architect exams although they do add in information about understanding the role of a consultant. The nonprofit and education consultant exams also expect you to know information about how those kinds of organizations work.

Developer exams expect you to read and understand Salesforce-related programming languages, know how the code will operate, and what errors to expect. Except for Platform Developer II, which requires a super badge, they do not currently expect you to write code.

Salesforce Exam Difficulty and Pass Thresholds

When you select an exam, you need to understand the intersection of difficulty and the passing threshold. Some exams are just plain harder than others. But Salesforce has internal expectations about ensuring that a reasonable number of people who attempt the hard exams also pass those exams. While I don’t know what those numbers are, the place they are most obvious is when you look at passing threshold.

Each exam has a defined percentage score to pass. When it is in the 70-80% range, you’re looking at an exam where the questions are right about on target for the audience taking that exam to pass at the rate Salesforce wants. When you see thresholds in the 60% range, the test is much harder – so Salesforce lowered the bar instead of making the questions easier.

If you know an area really well, and see a low passing threshold, that’s a great exam to target if you just need to pass one. If you don’t know that area well, be warned that’ll be a hard exam. Conversely, an exam with a high pass threshold has easy questions, which many lull you into a false sense of security as you take the exam.

Associate Exams are designed to have high pass rates. Architect exams are designed to have a lower pass rate. With most exams falling between those two points.

Understanding the required pass threshold can help determine how, and how long, you need to study.

Preparing for a Salesforce Exam

Salesforce exams are a lot like standardized tests from high school: nearly all multiple choice and conquerable if you memorize a bunch of information. It helps to understand why the platform does certain things to support guessing, but mostly you need to know what the system does.

Knowing that, once I’ve selected a Salesforce exam to take, I prepare in two phases:

Review official materials and create flash cards
Study the flash cards

Salesforce provides a break down of the content of each exam in both the exam guide and the official Trailhead Trailmix. In theory they include everything in those you will need to pass the exam – mileage here will vary. The lower the exam level, the better this material. For the architect level exams sometimes there are gaps you’ll need to fill to understand what information they are testing.

My first step in preparing for an exam is to review the exam guide, and all the information on the trailmix. I make my own flash cards from that information and then my second step is to study those flash cards until I take the exam. That’s all there is to it – memorize a bunch of stuff.

Exam Outline

The most important part of the official materials is the Exam Outline. Test creators are required to make sure these outlines are correct. There may be extra information or gaps in the Trailmix, but the outline is required to be complete and correct. Use the outline to help guide you as you create your flashcards.

What About 3rd Party Study Materials?

There are several sources for 3rd party study materials. Usually these services cost a few dollars, and they have what my friends at Salesforce call “disturbingly good” information about the exam content. It’s disturbing to Salesforce cause sometimes it’s often good enough to imply someone violated the rules while taking the exam. These third party materials typically come in three forms: courses, practice exams, and flash cards.

Courses

If the support of a course helps you, great. They don’t help me, like most students I can easily disengage when in online courses. For me, they are a waste of money – and as far as I can tell the success rate of people using just a course to prep is very low.

Practice Exams

Practice exams can be extremely helpful. Until I switched to making my own flash cards I used to use these a lot. Practice exams give you a chance to see questions similar to those you will see on the exam itself. More importantly good practice exams, like the ones from Focus on Force, will give you reference information for where the answer came from in the source documentation. That helps you understand why you were wrong.

You should plan to take the practice exams several times – maybe a dozen or more – before you’re ready for the real thing. You need to take them until you are 10-20% above the pass threshold of the exam. While these exams are often good, they also often a little behind the current Salesforce exam – so you should expect a performance gap between what you scored on the practice exam and what you will score on the real thing.

Flash Cards

Flash cards are, in my opinion, the best solution. I know, we all hate flash cards: they were boring in high school and they are boring now. What they are is effective. If your goal is to pass an exam that requires memorizing a bunch of “stuff” flashcards are where it’s at!

Make Your Own Flash Cards: Yes Really!

I make my own flashcards for most exams. And with one exception I passed on the first try. That exception: I accidentally skipped a section of the prep materials and so was missing several cards I needed.

There are a few reasons I make my own flashcards:

They are cheap: a pack of 100 note cards costs $0.89 at Staples right now. I usually need two packs because I generally create about 120 cards and make a dozen mistakes writing them out so we’re taking $1.78 + tax per exam. The Focus on Force Admin Study Guide,which has their flash cards, currently costs $24 – not at all unreasonable but also way more than a buck seventy eight.
Writing them out helps me remember what I’m reading: This is actually the bigger factor than costs. Writing things down helps us remember stuff. By putting in the effort to figure out what cards I need, and writing them out, I remember the information better. Also a few times I used sets from Focus on Force (they were good), and it was tiring to write theirs out so I printed them – which added costs and effort.
Writing your own allows you to personalize: the sets from Udemy, Quizlet, and elsewhere reflect what anyone might need to learn. When you create your own you include what you need to learn. Sometimes I add a few cards that are things I find along the way that I need in my work and aren’t likely to be on the exam. I almost always leave out some information I already know very well.

Risks

Creating my own flash cards brings it own risk. I do not have the level of insight that the 3rd party content creators have when they create their content. I also risk including extra material I don’t need for the exam or my work, which wastes my time memorizing. Still, on the whole, I favor creating my own flashcards over buying someone else’s.

The Right Amount of Studying

Salesforce Exams are pass-fail. A pass is perfect, and failure is disaster – there is nothing between those two points. That means the ideal amount of studying is when you study just enough to pass the exam by one question.

No one wants to fail an exam because they were unprepared. No one should waste time over studying – we have better ways to spend our time.

I have actually threaded this needle a couple times and passed by a hair’s breath. That is a scary feeling because any good test taker knows generally how it’s going as they proceed. When you’re right on the line it’s hard to know which side you’re on.

I used to study a lot, particularly when I used a practice exam based approach. It worked, but it took a lot of time to take all those practice exams. With the flash-card based approach I take as long as I need to create my flash cards, and once I’m convinced my deck is complete I schedule the exam for a week or two out. For exams with a high pass threshold, or are in an area where I am weak, I give myself two weeks. For exams with a lower pass threshold, particularly if it’s an area of strength for me, one week is plenty. During that time I run through the deck once or twice a day.

By exam day, I’m ready to go. As long as my deck has what I need, I’m good to go.

Taking A Salesforce Exam

Part 2 focuses on exam day, taking the exam itself, and recovering from failure when needed.