Description
With DevOps skills and expertise in huge demand, building a career in Salesforce DevOps is possibly the smartest (and most lucrative!) career move you can make right now. Who better to give you their expert advice on the ins and outs of the jobs market for Salesforce DevOps than Lucy Mazalon, Editor and Co-Founder of Salesforce Ben, and Heather Black, CEO and Founder of Supermums Training and Recruitment!
If you want to upskill and qualify in Salesforce DevOps, join the leading learning platform DevOps Launchpad.
This session from Gearset’s 2021 DevOps Summit is just one of our many DevOps events for Salesforce professionals out there! Check out more of Gearset’s summit and DevOps Dreamin’ for the latest in the ecosystem.
Transcript
Right. So DevOps career paths, especially in Salesforce DevOps, our hot topic.
These professionals make it possible, as you know, to deliver a continuous stream of added value to end users who rely on Salesforce every day. So there's no doubt that Salesforce DevOps specialists are deserving of that demand.
But making the transition into DevOps isn't always obvious. So I'm joined today by Heather, who will share tips on how to find the best fit for your personality.
So, Heather, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi, everyone. Great to be here today and to join Lucy on this panel. So my background is, career coaching and development and, having coached lots of, people into careers from two thousand and six. Now I focus my attention on helping people develop their careers within the salesforce industry. So we upskill moms, dads, and other people in technical skills, but also the softer professional skill sets as well. So that's what I'm gonna be talking about today on the session.
Amazing. Yeah. I'm always more how much you've got going on and all the initiatives you spearhead. So great stuff. And I'm Lucy Maslon. I'm the editor at salesforce bend dot com. We're a Salesforce blog and new site that's powered by content written by the Salesforce community.
So I've had many conversations.
And especially in twenty twenty one, I've had a lot of conversations with people who are upskilling on DevOps, and I'm always keeping my pulse on why people are doing that. I also have a background in consulting, which means that the pains that DevOps is aiming to solve resonate with me too.
So let's start by asking a question.
Why are sales professionals with DevOps skills in demand?
Well, in the annual survey, Gearset found that eighty five percent of teams already plan or use or plan to adopt DevOps practices this year.
Eighty five percent. That is a huge number. So it's no surprise that DevOps knowledge is highly valued.
And then there's a fact that everyone building on Salesforce will need to understand DevOps. In the same survey, they found that sixty two t percent of teams reported that they plan to train up their current workforce on DevOps practices to meet the challenges they face.
So if it's likely in your organization, if you have an appetite for DevOps, you could be in with a chance to, be supported in upskilling too.
When it comes to DevOps roles, the job titles don't always contain the term DevOps in them. Instead, DevOps is more a set of practices that are blended into roles, which is something Heather is gonna talk about more later.
The larger the team is or the more complex the processes that team handles, the more specific the DevOps roles and responsibilities become, for each individual in that team, which leads me to say it's good news for you because these specific DevOps roles could overlap a lot with what you're already doing now, especially admins and developers, and others who have really stepped up mark to gain control over development and deployments.
Then you need to decide which direction to go. Do you wanna stay wearing many hats being the sole go to person, who has been understanding of DevOps in your organization?
Or do you want to work in a larger team and specialize into, one of the specific DevOp roles?
So I'm gonna talk about four roles today, to help build an overlap between common Salesforce roles and DevOps skills that you could start to nurture.
So let's start with the first one.
In case you haven't guessed, this is an admin developer hybrid.
These days, as you may have noticed, many admins have some degree of developer knowledge and vice versa, developers who understand declarative configuration.
If that's you, here's how you can get involved in DevOps.
So start deploying declarative sorry, not start deploying declarative changes. Deploy declarative changes between orgs and start with version control.
So this means moving changes between sandbox and production, which you already do, but start to use version control to track changes over time and prevent overwrites.
Monitor changes made to orgs and roll back mistakes, and you roll back mistakes by restoring the previous state. But you need to understand which metadata needs to be included and just have a a deeper awareness of metadata.
Use automated DevOps processes to test, validate, and push code changes.
And an automated DevOps platform is a great option, because you can use clicks on code to help you on your way, to to, you know, becoming a DevOps professional.
So here's a real life example.
Monica's pretty impressive individual. She, self taught herself Salesforce and then got involved in DevOps.
And what hooked her was metadata.
So she really loved being able to see declarative changes she was making reflected in changes she was making in the Salesforce UI reflected directly in XML.
From there, she helped implement a version control process using GISAT and GitHub GitHub for their teams.
So this could be a way that you could get involved, in your organization too, especially if these practices don't exist.
Next up, we have consultants who work under the client's watchable eye.
There's high risk and little room for error here.
So deploying large Salesforce changes, sometimes the whole business units, they take care of a lot of business transformations.
They create standardized release models. They use that mantra, develop once, deploy anywhere so they can reuse these for smoother future deployments.
And they also set up clients for future success with faster, safer processes and workflows rather than leaving the client, to fend for themselves, which could turn into a free for all.
And here is someone else who's done that for many years.
Laura is a hybrid sales force consultant and project manager. She's got a real keen interest in making sure work is delivered on time and without risk. So the control and overview that DevOps gives really appealed to her.
And we see the develop once, deploy anywhere mantra come up again.
She says, you know, leveraging one tool to manage different client environments, was a real game changer for her role.
Architects and team leads develop agile DevOps practices and source driven workflows for everyone to contribute to.
So that's everybody working in collaboration without interfering with each other's work, not bumping up against each other.
These professionals do this by leveraging the team's DevOps tools and any integrated project management software.
They're responsible for DevOps performance and aim to increase the team's frequency and reliability for releases.
They also track KPIs for the team and report on DevOps ROI, which I find really fascinating as a subject.
If you're a Salesforce architect, perhaps some of these sound like you, sound like your interests too.
And finally, we have the QA engineer, which isn't so much a Salesforce specific role, but, obviously, these guys and girls crop up, in a lot in the Salesforce world.
So these professionals check newly developed features and customizations.
They check that they meet the user technical and, business requirements.
They get involved by executing tests like UI testing, especially, Ensuring that code conforms to best practice, compliance and security.
And they check that new features deliver exactly what the end users require.
Right so hopefully, I haven't said development and deployment too many times. I didn't trip off on that part, but over to Heather to talk more about, the the the psychology behind finding your feet in DevOps.
Brilliant. Thanks, Lucy. That's a really good foundation for what I'm gonna lead on and talk about. So if you're planning your career, and thinking about, well, how do I develop my skills, you know, maybe carve out a role specifically doing DevOps?
That's what we're gonna be looking, at within my next slide decks. So the first thing I'm gonna ask you to reflect on a little bit is, more from a coaching point of view, having been a coach, and that's sort of under understanding your personality. Now, equally, I think you could argue that you could have any type of personality, maybe do DevOps. But if you wanna specialize in it, I think there's a couple of personality types that will probably, really resonate with it in in a more of a uniform way.
So the DISC profile is a commonly used personality profiling tool. This you can find free DISC tests online. I've put a link to one at the bottom. Tony Robbins has one on his site, but there's various other free ones that came up.
So it might be worth you doing a a DISC test. And the reason that this will be useful is because as I go through the slides, I will be talking through about how to sell yourself as a DevOps person. And if you understand your personality better and the traits that you can bring to a job role, you can be much more articulate about describing, who you are and and what you can deliver and your attributes. And, actually, it's really interesting looking at some of the job specs because that there's quite a lot around attributes in there as you'll see.
So the first thing that I'd encourage you to do is is do a free DISC assessment. Work out what is your personality.
Are you a d, an I, a c, or an s, which, stands for, dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness.
Now I highlighted the s and the c here because I felt that if you were going to be a specialist DevOps role, or work work within DevOps as a specialist, s and c personalities may be more suited to that because if you look at c, they their personalities tend to place more emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency, which is what it a lot of this is about. It's about, making sure that things happen in a very uniform way. Quality testing is done properly. So you can see that all resonates there. The other, personality that I pointed out here is s, which is the steadiness.
And there's a lot around cooperation.
The the the actual dev ops is about cooperation between teams. So equally, you might have those skill sets that is about communication, that is about cooperation, and about bringing teams together to make sure things work in a very timely way.
So you've got to have good people skills as well as more the rigor around the the policy and accuracy.
Now if we were just to reflect, this is from, the Launchpad, site that they have set up to really educate people in what DevOps is all about.
And so, you know, don't be sat here sort of being overwhelmed of, like, will I ever know everything? What you can do is head over to the DevOps platform, and hopefully somebody can put a link in the chat for you to that site as we're talking.
And, you can work your way up from being one of pre DevOps where you're kind of getting, you know, finding your feet to then sort of working all your way up to resilience, and really understanding how you can deploy, DevOps really functionally and and measuring the ROI as Lucy referred to with the architects, and developing your path. So on the DevOps launchpad, you're in a whole series of modules that you can do. Some are very agnostic, whereas others go into what offers or Git offers, and really just helps you understand the whole environment in much more detail. So that's a great place to start. And if you start learning in this way, these are great things to add to your CV because Gear Set and the Dev DevOps Launchpad give you certificates.
And you can complete one. The getting started with DevOps Launchpad is literally half an hour. But what that means oh, sorry. The introduction to Salesforce development is half an hour, and that's a good starting one to do.
And then from there, you can add up. So you can immediately add value to your knowledge, your CVs, and start your learning journey.
Now selling yourself, as Lucy mentioned, DevOps is appearing in all level of job titles. Like, even if you're a Salesforce admin, it's in here. So I just went into LinkedIn, and typed in DevOps in the job search. And you can see job DevOps is appearing all over the place now.
So you've got it in Salesforce admin, business analyst. You've got it in consultants. You've got, agile is really interesting. So, again, I teach agile project management through Supermoms.
That is another key skill that people are wanting alongside DevOps. So it's really interesting that agile and DevOps are constantly coming up, together. You've got DevOps within operations. You've got it with engineers, consulting partners, product owners.
It literally is now something that's just popping up. So I think given that it's against all these different types of job roles, having knowledge and understanding about what DevOps is from the simplest version of DevOps to more of a complex one is going to be the norm going forward. Hence, why starting your learning journey sooner rather than later is probably a good thing.
Now the other thing I did for you is look at some of the job specs that were coming up and pull out the interesting kind of attributes, technical skills, professional skills they're looking for.
And this is attributes, technical skills, professional skills they're looking for. And this is quite common across quite a few of those job specs. So from a technical skill point of view, they're looking for people with experience in DevOps and what that means, the different systems, the different tools, gives that obviously being one of those products that you could use, and really understanding, like, you know, how how that works in practice.
You then got a whole attributes piece, and I think this comes very much alongside that it is about teams working together collaboratively.
And I love some of the the comments that they put here, but this is why I said the DISC profile could be really interesting for you to kind of really understand who you are and what attributes you might bring to a project.
So some of the the attributes here that they're asking for is that you can move fast, be bold, and thrive in a dynamic, quickly changing environment. You can manage competing demands from demanding stakeholders in a frantic environment.
You can enjoy problem solving and think logically.
And so all these things that you've gotta be able to feel comfortable with.
You've got to contribute to a diverse team with different backgrounds and skills. You've got to take responsibility for a piece of work, and you've got to enjoy providing a supportive environment to growing people in a team around you. So it's very collaborative. It's very people orientated.
It's very about being, you know, fast, bold, thriving.
You know, it's about holding and taking that responsibility.
So the more you understand about your personality and how you communicate that, will stand you in good stead. And then finally, on the right hand side, you've got professional skills. So as I mentioned, agile comes up all over the place with DevOps. And so agile project management is a great skill, to get under your belt.
Having knowledge on the people and process angles, so to be able to sort of do process mapping and modeling, excellent client facing capabilities, client managing client relationships successfully, people management skills. Again, I emphasize this a lot in in the work that I do with my trainees. I teach them coaching tools and techniques in order for them to be more successful at Salesforce projects because people management, communication skills, influencing sales skills, negotiation skills is all really essential for any Salesforce project and also for DevOps.
So they're all things to think about and emphasize about wave and that in the past, what training you might have had, you know, have you got coaching skills and techniques that you can add to the to your CV, or have you done any sort of team building training, leadership training, management training? All these things will add to that professional skill set, And they want to know that you can work collaboratively, to get things through the net. So they're the different sort of skill set that people are looking for, when you apply for jobs and say DevOps is now becoming integral to kind of all those different roles. So just to summarize, really, if you were sort of presenting yourself, to an employer, and and suggesting that you can do DevOps as part of a wider skill set or indeed the main skill set, these are things I'd really think about putting across. One is what is your relevant experience at whatever level that is.
So whether it's a novice to more senior. So talk about your DevOps experience on any CV going forward because as a admin to architect, it's it's it's gonna be embedded somewhere.
Secondly, let's talk about your professional skills. So is that management skills, leadership skills, coaching skills, agile project management, business analysis? Ian was talking a lot about that in the last session. They're the other professional skills that you want to get under your belt.
Technical skills, what Salesforce certifications and what technical third party DevOps products have you got. So, again, head over to the DevOps launchpad and start building up those additional certifications that will sort of start to, certify you for DevOps related work. And the final thing is that communication skills. So, again, leadership coaching, relationship team building, aspects there that complement the professional skill sets.
So they're the things that I would really encourage you to put across based on what people are asking for in those job specs. And when you sell yourself the interview, make sure that you create confidence in yourself. So get rid of that imposter syndrome and start cracking down on some of those certs.
Demonstrate your skills and experience. A lot with DevOps, it might feel very new, but, actually, most of you are probably doing some level of it already, or you're already sort of excelling in it. So have confidence in what you know at that stage, but also understand where you want to get to and communicate that because some of those job specs were saying, also, you know, we're keen to develop you in the DevOps role, so don't feel like you have to know everything. Talk about tools, templates, questions, methodologies that you use.
And so if you've trained up in agile project management and business analysis, what I teach my Chinese is very much to communicate and present the methodology you would use. They have the decks. Go and talk about the methodology. Don't just make it up and be wishy washy.
Say, right. This is my agile project management approach. This is what I've been taught. This is what I learned.
That's what I encourage my students to do. Ask for references on your LinkedIn. If you get them on your LinkedIn, you can then include them in your CV and easily then provide them for anybody else. So start to build up your references, tag yourself for DevOps as well, get recommendations for DevOps, and build your skills.
Like, it's a lifelong learning situation with Salesforce and everything that we do in this ecosystem. So shadow somebody who's already doing DevOps if you're not sure. Ask for a mentor in DevOps. Get some training or some work experience in DevOps as well.
Like, don't be scared of asking people for help. The ecosystem is very brought into that shared learning, and just having somebody hold your hand. And it's been great. You know, over the last month, we've been working with Gear Sets through the Signum CPD program because we wanted to provide that environment and that accountability and motivation to get people to go, right, this month, we're gonna look at DevOps.
So find that sort of accountability, and I'm gonna go on to that in the next slide. The final thing is show your enthusiasm to learn. So what do you know now, what do you want to know in the future, and how are you going to learn it? So really sort of think about what's gonna motivate you, what's gonna encourage you to do this, what is it you want to achieve, is it you want to get the highest salary, is it you want more flexibility, is it that you wanna specialize and have a niche in something which is very much encouraged within the sector.
And so I wish you all the good luck with everything that Lucy and I have shared with you today. I hope that sets you up, for progression your career with DevOps. Thank you.
Thank you, Lucy and Heather. We have a couple of minutes now for a little bit of q and a. I know there have been quite a few questions coming into the chat. So I think a a starting one, I is, what what drew you both into the Salesforce ecosystem? How did you both get in entangled in it all?
Heather, you go fast. I know.
Well, I became an accidental admin, so I was running a nonprofit that delivered career coaching to young people. And so we I stumbled across Salesforce because it's free for nonprofits and started to use it and went on the admin tier one course, which was back in two thousand and nine, ten.
And, yeah, basically, after the tier one course, became addicted to Salesforce and then did my advanced admin, a consultancy certification, which is, a consultancy course that Salesforce delivered at that time, which is all back in two thousand and ten. So that started me off on, my consultancy career and then working with nonprofit. So I've overseen over seven hundred projects, with nonprofits since then, and now it's been my time coaching and training other Salesforce consultants and admins. Lucy.
Yeah. You've seen so much. The ecosystem. Two thousand nine. Wow. Let's, well, many, many years.
I, yeah, the reason why I asked Heather to go first is mine. It's quite boring. I fell into the ecosystem.
I started working for a sales society, when I was a graduate. So I have no idea no idea really what sales was and have just embedded myself since then.
I've known Ben for many years. So I've been running the blog in the background with him, and that gave me an exposure to all corners of the platform. We tried to cover we tried to cover everything, but it's becoming harder and harder as things grow.
Then I got a real appetite to Pardot, and so I became a Pardot consultant.
Excellent. Next one is is one that you you've already partially answered, but I I think I'll ask it anyway because it's quite interesting is, what's your top tip for folks who are wanting to pursue or move into a career in Salesforce, but maybe a little bit hesitant or not quite sure where to to start or or may not be sure that it's right for them?
I think, you know, Heather has mentioned the DevOps Launchpad very often, because it's such a great resource. I think it's developed by people who have that knowledge, and it's something quite that's gonna be quite hard to teach. And I think the way that they've structured it and distilled that information is a great place to start if you're talking specifically with DevOps. Otherwise, the answer will just probably Trailhead, and the Trailblazer community.
But it can be quite intimidating to go there and see so much, contents and so many different ways, paths to take. So doing research around that as well.
There's there's off there's so many blogs in the ecosystem that share people's experiences and, you know, what career path they took. So it could be a great way to extend your research if you're not certain about a sales source career.
