Much to my dismay, I was unable to attend Dreamforce this year.  I did however get a chance to touch base with a  few folks that did attend a learn a bit more about the upcoming changes to Salesforce certifications.

Verified

The Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant is a new certification and is available today.  You can register for the certification exam at www.webassessor.com.  As soon as I have a chance I’ll be diving into this one!

Unverified

• The Salesforce Certified Consultant exam will be phased out and no longer be offered.
  • It will be replaced with the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant (available today; see above) and Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant exams.
    • Salesforce Certified Administrator will become a prerequisite for both above exams.
  • Those of us with existing Consultant Certifications will be able to test for one of the above certifications for free.

Further Speculation

If the above changes are true, I suspect changes to the developer certifications are in order as well.  Perhaps Certified Custom Cloud Consultant or like?  Personally, I think the Developer certification is horribly misleading, as it has very little do with development in the traditional sense.  The distinction between a developer and advanced developer to the outside world is all but lost in my experience.

Did you attend DF?  Did you hear any of the same?  Please keep me in the loop, feel free to comment below!

Cheers,

John

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion surround the maintenance fees for certified professionals.  I was having a hard time understanding the fee schedule myself, so I asked for clarification.  Here’s what I learned:

You will be charged $100 per year per certification track you maintain.  Maintenance fees start one year (or 3 releases) after your first achieved certification within that track.  There are 2 tracks:

Administrator (entails Administrator, Advanced Administrator, and Consultant)

Developer (entails Developer, Advanced Developer)

In short, the maximum amount you will be charged per year is $200 for certification maintenance, although each track may be billed at different periods.

Hope this clarifies for those with any remaining questions.  Cheers,

John

I spent some time digging through the various certification materials, and it seems I was mistaken about the advanced administrator exam: it does not require code knowledge.  I will definitely pursue that one in the future.  I’ve posted a table here outlining the different certifications.  I have also gotten several requests to update site content for the existing administrator exam outline so look for some new content this week.  Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback so far on the site.

Salesforce has released 3 new certifications:

Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer – appears to be similar to the Certified Administrator but with more emphasis on creating applications and data structures.

Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Advanced Developer

Salesforce.com Certified Consultant – seems to focus on analyzing project requirements and methods of implementation

Official Site

Definitely interested… will work through these a bit and post more info.