Trailhead is a great avenue for you to learn about Salesforce and get fully benefitted from this platform. You can learn everything about Salesforce out here in a fun and engaging way if you have time for it. With many competing demands in terms of work responsibilities and personal lives, it may not be easy to find enough time and focus on the whole Salesforce Trailhead.
How to Make the Most out of Salesforce Trailhead
Let us here explore the top tips from experts on how to stay on track and make the most out of your time spent on Trailheads.
1. Have an idea as to how much time you got to dedicate to it
Exploring Trailhead is not just a matter of time commitment but is a personal commitment you have to make yourself. The primary objective of exploring Trailhead is to enhance your Salesforce skills and thereby productivity. This demands your time and commitment. Even if it is just 5 minutes or four hours a day, you need first to decide how much time you can dedicate to Trailhead and be consistent with your schedule. With such a time commitment, the one who ultimately gets benefitted is none other than you.
To do this well, establish a Trailhead appointment for yourself (and the others too if you are trailblazing with the team), and stick to the schedules. Always dedicate the Trailhead time only for this purpose. You may try to create some environment which may help to focus better. For example, you can be in a quiet and distraction-free place. This may not always be possible at an office, but at least you can make sure that you disable the device notifications and other possible distractions during this time. While Trailheading, the time estimation with each unit will help you to productivity manage your time.
2. Get a clear idea about the content structure in light of your Salesforce modules
The content of Trailhead is carefully structured to make it easy to categorize and digest. The trails are structured in multiple modules, and these modules are further divided into units. Even the smallest units have standalone learning objectives.
Once if you understand Trailhead content’s organization, it becomes much easier for you to tackle the content in such a way that it enables you to invest your time to get the most out of these. Sometimes, you may want to explore the complete trail in one sitting, and some other times, you may think of going for one module at a time. You can even benefit from breaking the units further into “micro-units” and explore these one at a time based on your time allocation. There are clear headings for each topic under each unit, which makes the micro-unit division easier.
3. Review the learning objective in light of your use case
Specific and measurable learning objectives for Salesforce Trailhead are carefully designed not just to make its development easier. Still, it is done so to keep the different learning objectives of various users in mind. Each of the Trailhead units has its own unique but inter-dependent learning objectives. As Flosum consultants put it forth, these well-defined learning objectives attached with each unit will tell you what you will get on completing the same. Going through these objectives will also tell you what tasks you will do to complete the units successfully. You will also get an idea about what assessment will be done to gauge your capabilities to resolve the challenges related to it.
4. Do not skip content; cover it fully
When you are familiar with some aspects of Salesforce, you may likely come across some Trailhead tops, which you may find you already know. So, there may be a temptation to skip the content just by having a glance than reading through it. However, in such scenarios, try to at least skin the topics. Never skip these fully, as you may be missing some key topics or smart ways other than what you think you already know. When you find something new, re-read it diligently to ensure that you fully understand it and can bring it into practice confidently. It not necessarily bad, even if you find nothing new out of that you already know. You have just reconfirmed your knowledge so that you can confidently move on to higher levels of learning.
5. Take the challenges seriously
Challenges are hard, even though minor or major. However, you have to consider them seriously and get through it to test your mettle. In the case of Salesforce Trailheads, assessments are the most vital part of your learning. These are the testing grounds for you to know that you can confidently bring what you have learned into practice.
As per Salesforce Trailhead builders, the challenges are out there to evaluate the learners’ understanding of the units and to test the knowledge. So, taking your time to get through these challenges seriously will help you ensure that you understand the concepts well and apply those confidently outside the learning environment. If you find something going wrong during the assessments, you can revisit it to see what went wrong, relearn it, and attempt the challenge again to acquire the skill will the fullest confidence.
6. Engage with the Trailhead community
Trailhead community is very active and engaging with participants of all levels from across the globe. There are many ways through which you can effectively engage with the Trailhead community as by:
- Share your progress.
- Throw up your thoughts and engage in discussions.
- Raise your queries.
- Gain out-of-the-box knowledge about related things.
- Help other fellow trailblazers and so on.
You can post it on Trailhead Forums if you have any queries or what to share your new knowledge gained. There is also Salesforce Developer Community Forum where you can get answers to your technical doubts too. There are also many specific Salesforce user Groups too which meet up for Trailhead learning. You can try to find such a local group also and see what others are doing with Trailhead.
Setting up your Trailhead plans in light of the above smart tips can surely take you a long way to be a successful Salesforce developer/consultant/user.
