February marked the first Salesforce Republic meetup of 2020. Held in our London HQ, the evening began with pizza, drinks and plenty of time for networking and catching up after a couple of months off.
Here at Third Republic we truly understand the value of connecting with your peers. We always ensure that attendees of our Salesforce Republic events are given the time to catch up with both friends and new faces in the ecosystem.
Our first meetup of the year saw two fantastic speakers join us to share their advice on some seriously hot topics in the ecosystem. Hamza Abib, Solutions Architect at Bluewolf shared his personal experiences with Salesforce and becoming certified.
Our second speaker of the night was Debra Carlyle, Customer Success Manager at Validity. Debra joined us to provide attendees with some valuable insights around productivity and the importance of data quality.
The journey to becoming certified
23x certified Salesforce Solution Architect, Hamza Abib, kicked-off the evening with an insight into his career journey with Salesforce. Hamza explained how a career with Salesforce is all about continual learning. He discussed how he uses certifications as a means to ensure his knowledge of platform remains up-to-date. Talking of becoming certified he explained how failure is ok, and how it should be used as another learning curve on your Salesforce career journey.
Hamza also spoke about the numerous different career paths available with Salesforce and how before deciding to become certified you must ask yourself these questions:
• Are you willing to put the work in?
• Are you prepared to maintain the knowledge?
• Are you willing to adapt?
Becoming certified is (as Hamza mentioned early on in his talk) all about continual learning. Getting certified requires a lot of hard work, and once you become certified, you need to be prepared to maintain the knowledge. Hamza mentioned the benefits that he has seen as a result of becoming certified. His certs have allowed him to remain on the cutting-edge of the platform and have unlocked multiple opportunities for him. He also says he has been able to quadruple his salary from becoming certified.
Finally, Hamza encouraged the attendees to continue blazing their trail with Trailhead and opened up to the floor for questions. The audience were most interested in the benefits of certifications on Salesforce careers, and Third Republic’s specialist Recruiter, Chris Harvey, join Hamza to help answer some of the queries around benefits to salary and job security.
From Spreadsheets to Salesforce
After a short break to grab a drink and some more pizza, Debra Carlyle rounded off the evening with insights and advice into data quality and how it can improve productivity. Debra noted that working with quality data means sales teams will have more hours to work productively, thus more time to make more money.
She explained how to organise and use quality data effectively and the reasons why data quality is the responsibility of everyone in the business. The overall message to take away from Debra’s presentation was this; the better the user experience (UX), means better productivity, which will result in better data quality.
Thank you
We’d like to thank everyone who attended the event and contributed to a fantastic evening. With special thanks going to our wonderful speakers Hamza and Debra for sharing their valuable career tips, tricks and experiences.
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