How Do I Transition Into a Salesforce Admin Career?

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about how he landed his first Salesforce Admin role and what advice he has for folks who are new to the ecosystem.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.

A career pivot from finance to Salesforce

If you didn’t catch David’s presentation about resolving Flow errors at Dreamforce, be sure to check out our earlier episode with him. Another thing that came up was his career pivot, and it was so interesting that I had to bring him back to talk about it.

David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. He had to run a lot of reports and quickly discovered that the thing he was actually interested in was the Salesforce platform.

Soon enough, David became the part-time admin for his organization, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to just focus on Salesforce, he would need to find a new job.

What to look for in a job description

While David bulked up his credentials, he started looking for full-time Salesforce Admin roles to apply to. One piece of advice he has is to take a closer look at the job description and be clear about what you want.

“It’s not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things,” he says, “but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work.”

David also was really specific about finding an organization that was already committed to Salesforce. He looked for green flags like job postings with specifics on certifications or Superbadges. Finally, it was important to him to join a Salesforce team as opposed to try to cut his teeth as a solo admin.

Find opportunities to grow as an admin

David’s advice for people new to the ecosystem is to get curious. Back when he was a part-time admin, he was laser-focused on opportunities because that was what his organization was asking him to do. 

“I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt,” he says, “and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things.” Reflecting now, he sees where he could have taken the initiative to try automations or enhance integrations and become a better admin in the process.

There are a lot more great tips from David about his pivot into a Salesforce Admin career, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin

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Full show transcript

Mike:
Welcome to Salesforce Admins podcast. This week I’m joined by David Simpson, who you might remember from our pre-Dreamforce chat not that long ago. It was a little over a month ago, but this time we’re diving into something that really hits close to home for a lot of Salesforce admins, and that is career change. The number one question I get in my inbox is how do I find a different career? What does it look like to interview as a first time Salesforce admin and questions like that? I’m telling you, we’re going to dive into all of that with David because he’s going to share how he went from spreadsheets as a staff accountant to automations as a Salesforce admin and what his transition looked like.
We get into certifications. We talk about job hunting. We talk about imposter syndrome, and I dig into what it looked like to be a brand new Salesforce admin on his first day at a new job. I think this might be the most comprehensive podcast interview about what it looks like to change careers that I’ve done since I’ve launched this show. If you’re curious about how David did it, this is the episode for you. Give it a listen and let’s get David on the podcast.

So, David, welcome back to the podcast.

David Simpson:
Thank you for having me back.

Mike:
It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you’re giving at Dreamforce, and we’ve since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn’t blame you. There’s a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven’t talked about careers a whole lot, but let’s just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I’ve watched a lot of streaming things. Let’s fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin.

David Simpson:
Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins.

Mike:
Exactly.

David Simpson:
So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company’s Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean.

So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn’t too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data.

So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it’s all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn’t have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it.

Mike:
And I think career changes are hard. I went from sales to becoming an admin as well, and I think everybody kind of looks at like, well, what do I have to do? Or where do I have to go? Or what skills are required? And I think you, like me, kind of got fortunate you were with a company that was like, “Hey, we need these skills.” And I’m assuming you probably did both jobs for a while, right?

David Simpson:
Yes. I was doing both jobs up until I left the company. It was essentially 50/50 financial systems analysis and then admin work.

Mike:
So, it’s not like you just all of a sudden jumped in the pilot seat and took over the plane and away you go.

David Simpson:
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case for me. I was able to kind ease myself into the admin role because I still had work to do on the financial side.

Mike:
Yeah. And I think that that works out as an incredibly lucky path.

David Simpson:
Yeah, definitely.

Mike:
One thing, so you mentioned they didn’t have the budget for a full-time admin, which is the role you wanted to pursue. Did you consider just staying at that current position and kind of dividing your time, or was this something where you were like, “No, I really, this is, I’m going to commit?”

David Simpson:
It was something that I really wanted to commit on. In the beginning when I had first gotten