Salesforce knowledge is a resume requirement and office essential for many careers. However, becoming comfortable with the ins and outs of Salesforce can feel overwhelming. In the past, this necessitated spending countless hours on YouTube and Google looking for information or paying for a class. 

Improving the employee experience is the top objective for companies in 2016. Furthermore, companies are 3X more likely to attribute measurable business outcomes to the use of Salesforce when employees believe that Salesforce makes their jobs easier. Investing in the user experience is the best way to drive both employee efficiency and employee satisfaction, allowing them to spend less time managing administrative tasks and more time with their customer.  

In the past, asking employees to expand their Salesforce skills or just learn the basics used to leave them feeling intimidated and overwhelmed. 

The Salesforce Solution 

Trailhead is Salesforce’s online course that teaches users how to best use the platform. This program simplifies the learning process and ensures that users gain the best skills because it was designed by the same people who built Salesforce’s products. 

Users new to the platform can choose a level of Salesforce knowledge, a role, and which product they want to learn about. Trailhead then filters its course suggestions accordingly, providing a customized experience for each user. Gone are the days of slogging through information that is not relevant to your role and use of Salesforce. 

Launched at Dreamforce in 2014, Trailhead is not necessarily new, but its popularity continues to grow. Salesforce reported via eWeek that they have “already seen participants pass more than one million learning challenges, earning more than 250,000 badges.”     

Trailhead is free to any Salesforce user who has a  free developer profile or above. The only investment required is the user’s time, easing the financial burden of a company requiring employees to pass through expensive third-party class offerings. 

Trailhead makes learning simple and fun 

Trailhead is organized so that users can take an entire course (called a Trail), or pick and choose individual lessons (called Modules). For example, you can take the “Admin Beginner” Trail and learn the basics of being a Salesforce administrator, or get comfortable with the new Lightning experience in “Develop for Lightning Experience.” If you need to brush up on a specific function and don’t need an entire course, you can select an individual Module. These range from “Accounts and Contacts,” which teaches you how to create and change accounts and contacts, to “HTML5 and Hybrid,” which covers the different functions of HTML in the platform. More content is regularly added to each trail in order to keep up with the Salesforce’s continuous product evolutions.You can start a Trail or Module at any time, save your progress and return to the same spot at a later time. 

Because Salesforce understands the importance of gamification, each Trail and Module conclude with Challenges — interactive assessments that allow you to display your knowledge. When you complete the Challenge, you receive a badge that is shareable across social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) and your developer profile. This allows employees and teams to easily track their individual and collective Salesforce knowledge. Now with Salesforce Trailhead, employee education and onboarding is easier and faster, allowing employees to focus on driving business results, now.  

Watch for Trailhead updates coming in 2016. To learn how the best companies are using Salesforce now, download The State of Salesforce Report.