Ready to take the next step in your admin career but unsure where to start? Take a page out of my book and learn development fundamentals to jumpstart your abilities as an advanced admin and extend your Salesforce Platform knowledge.
Several years ago, I was at a career tipping point. I felt solid in my admin skills but wasn’t sure what was next. I had also recently made the shift from being an Individual Contributor to being a People Manager and for the first time in my career was responsible for deciding what my professional development and continued education looked like.
At the time, roles like business analysts and architects existed but weren’t as well-publicized as they are now. I remember going to conferences and events and meeting new people in my field, and they were all admins or developers. This made me believe that learning to code was the next logical step in my career.
There are several programs that teach admins to code, and I settled on RAD Women because their mission resonated with me.
“The primary goal of Radical Apex Developers (RAD) Women is to provide a supportive and collaborative environment for advanced women Salesforce admins to build upon their existing click-based administration skills and learn to program on the Force.com platform.”
After enrolling and going through the 10-week program (which included putting in additional hours toward classes, homework, and my graduation project), I learned a lot. But the #1 thing I learned about myself was that I didn’t want to be a developer. However, what I did learn made me a stronger Salesforce Admin.
Admins are the product owners for Salesforce at their organization and, consequently, the ones that know the users and the business processes best. While admins don’t need to know how to do everything in Salesforce (such as code), it’s their responsibility to know what’s possible. It also requires understanding to convey technical terms back to users in a way that makes their jobs easier.
Finally, it doesn’t matter if you’re an admin or a developer—we’re all on the same team and need to be able to communicate effectively. Admins need dev fundamentals to understand the big picture in the same way developers need to understand declarative possibilities.
Since going through this program, there are four key dev fundamentals I use every week. Let’s dive in!
This article is based on my session from Dreamforce 2024, “Why Admins Should Learn Dev Fundamentals.” Watch the recording to see these principles in action.
Pseudocode is code written in plain language that describes what we want the code to do. Using pseudocode helps us break down a complex process step by step to organize our thoughts and detail all the steps involved.
The goal for developers is to work out a business process without getting bogged down in syntax, but as an admin, this skill has helped me with my user communication. I’m often training users or creating demos and documentation to support new feature rollouts. Breaking down my process granularly with pseudocode helps me get in the mind of the user and make technical concepts and processes easy to perform.
As Salesforce Admins, the most fun part of our job is building on the platform. To do this effectively and not build up technical debt in our Salesforce orgs, it’s important to have a full understanding of data types and how to properly assign variables. This means understanding how data enters the system (whether manually, through imports, or integrations) and how it’s formatted.
When we create custom objects and fields to customize our instance, we need to ensure that our data inputs match any reporting outputs. It’s also important, when creating automation in Flow, to properly assign our variables so we can reference them throughout the flow.
I learned how to use Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) through RAD Women, but then learned how to extend its power as a Salesforce Admin from Louise Lockie.
As admins, we can be at the beck and call of our users when they need help with reports, and oftentimes users don’t know how to vocalize exactly what they want from a report. We must adapt midway through providing analytics because we need to change report types or make an adjustment due to data architecture. Using SOQL allows us to bypass this by querying Salesforce and adding on elements that might not be accessible in a report type, saving us tons of time.
Salesforce Admins love to automate business processes with Flow Builder. Another dev fundamental that will help you build your flows using best practices and avoid hitting governor limits entails keeping Database Manipulation Language (DML) and SOQL out of your loops. Here are a couple of definitions to make sure we’re in agreement.
Salesforce limits us to 150 DML statements and 100 SOQL queries in a single transaction. If you loop through something enough times, you can easily run into these limits and cause your flow to error. Best practice is to loop through your records, and once your loop is completed, act on your records. This will ensure you don’t hit those transaction limits; the only limit you’ll need to be concerned with is the total limit for transactions in a flow, which is 20,000 (a lot less likely to hit).
The big lesson for me was that I didn’t need to look for a new Salesforce role—being a Salesforce Admin is, dare I say, awesome! There are ways to extend your platform knowledge and become a more advanced admin to better support your users, your Salesforce instance, and your career. Learning dev fundamentals can help you get there.
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