Students become familiar with the Salesforce Administrator Certification Exam Guide, which is available here:
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/help?article=Salesforce-Certified-Administrator-Exam-Guide

This course is structured for each section that follows to correspond with the 12 sections of the Exam Guide:

- Organization Setup (Global UI)
- User Setup
- Security and Access
- Standard and Custom Objects
- Sales and Marketing Applications
- Service and Support Applications
- Activity Management and Collaboration
- Data Management
- Analytics - Reports and Dashboards
- Workflow / Process Automation
- Desktop and Mobile Administration
- AppExchange

Transcript:

So now we're going to talk about the different sections of the exam guide and I've got a print out here and I'll show you on my screen as well how this course will be laid out.

Now Salesforce recently released an update to their exam guide which was formerly called the study guide.

So if you ever hear me or anyone else talking about the study guide this is what I'm talking about.

It's the exam guide it's the official document from Salesforce.

It's about 15 pages long and it goes through what is now the 12 sections of the certification exam.

And so a couple of things I want to explain because I've had over 15,000 (now 60,000) students go through this course now and there's been a lot of questions about how to find the exam guide.

So if you go to a certification Salesforce dot com if you go to the credentials link here on the top left you see either on the drop down this section for administrators or that on the left here as well if you go to the credentials page is the administrators link.

So click on that and if you scroll down here you've got options for the certified administrator or the certified advanced administrator. Now also I've gotten questions of what all this course includes.

This just covers the certified administrator exam not the advanced administrator.

I will be releasing an advanced administrator course in the near future. (It is now out)

But for now this course deals with what is known as the admin to learn.

Now if we click See Details under the certified in Administrator section you can scroll down as well and you see information about the exam and this is good to become familiar with.

There are 60 multiple choice questions and there also may be 4-5 unscored questions that may be added on your exam and that Salesforce's way of now vetting new questions for the certification exam.

And so if you start your tests and you have like 60 to 65 questions don't let that throw you.

You may have some newer material on there and those newer questions won't be graded and so they also have a note here that you may have more than 60 questions.

I've also seen Salesforce a lot more time to the test taker for those that are selected for additional questions so there's a 90 minute allotted time by default for the exam and then a 65 percent passing score.

I'll have more in towards the end of this Course related to test taking strategies and answer questions around you know how to take the test and also just one thing to note though for these multiple choice questions would be that whenever there's a multiple select question where you need to select two or more correct answers selected will be very explicit in how many answers you need to select.

And so they will tell you select the two correct answers or select the three etc. and you can't proceed in the test are submitted if you're short or long on the number of questions that you've selected.

So a radio button on a test will be a single selection the checkbox will be a multiple selection and they will tell you very specifically how many to select.

Also encourage you to go through these sample questions on the exam guide.

This will give you an idea of some of the types of questions that you'll encounter on the test.

But we're here to talk about the exam guide.

And so let's click on this link here that says for full exam outline. Click here for the exam guides.

Clicking on that will go to my downloads.

But I've got it up here and this is the certification exam guide for the certified administrator for Summer '17.

Now there was a significant thing that happened with this particular course and certification on the Summer 17 release which came July 17th of 2017 and recording this shortly thereafter.

And the main takeaway is that Salesforce has condensed down from 15 knowledge areas to 12.

And that's kind of a welcome change because there were a few areas of the exam that weren't weighted very heavily.

So they combined some of those is all that's about.

So this course is up to date.

And I have worked on rearranging the lectures where they fall so that we follow along with the sections of the exam guide.

And so once again here's the information about the exam with the passing score the cost to register the cost to retake.

And you can take the test online or on side of information towards the end of this course about that recommended training and references and so there some instructor lead training courses that are weeklong they're very good but also very expensive.

They also mentioned trailhead which I do encourage you to supplement what you learn here with trailhead.

And then also just to answer another quick question.

My course curriculum is something that I created myself from the years of experience of being a developer an administrator on the platform.

And so this course is not the official curriculum from Salesforce but something that I created based on my own real world experience so that you understand the concepts that you need to know in order to pass the exam.

And if you've looked at the reviews of the course.

Now I mentioned earlier there's been 15000 students I think it's over 17000 now actually the reviews have been blowing me away.

I've been very thankful on how this has been received by the public and so with this new exam Guide though these 12 knowledge areas are the organization set up global UI.

You see here that weighting and these may change over time and so I always encourage students to look at the latest and greatest exam guide that's available for certification from Salesforce at the time of this recording you see the waiting for each of these sections and then after organizations set up and global UI we have user set up and then we have security and access and this is where we get into profiles and roles and permissions sets also known as persona's.

And we're getting into some of the meteor topics of course and so you notice that we start out early with some of the juice the global UI and the organization is set up that some of the foundational things when you're first getting started and getting oriented to the lay out.

And then we set up your user account in the course and then we get into the nitty gritty of the security and access concerns.

And so I feel like you know the best way to structure course is to follow the structure of the exam guy because I feel like it's laid out logically.

Also you'll want to become familiar with the different bullet points that you find on the exam guide and I strive to cover every topic that you find in these bullet points in this course and then also you can always look on trail head for supplemental information related to these bullets and also check out my practice tests course as well.

And then next week as standard and custom objects and we do a lot with standard objects custom object standard fields custom fields and announced the nuances of all that and then beyond that we go into sales and marketing applications.

That's where we'll get into leads and contacts and accounts and opportunities and then we've got service and support applications waited a little less and that's where we get into cases and knowledge and web cases cetera and then beyond that activity management and collaboration.

This is one of the newer combined sections.

There used to be a section for activity management on the old admin exam guide is weighted at 2 percent and then collaboration means chatter any time you see the word collaboration that means chatter.

And that was weighted at one percent which really threw me because how do you do one percent waiting on a 60 question test.

Is it like sometimes it will be on the test and sometimes it's not.

So they combine those two and that's a very welcome change from my perspective it just makes things easier to condense down the knowledge areas and then as well when I'm trying to weight my practice tests course and the different practice test questions.

It's easier to do that with 12 knowledge areas rather than 15 and deal with that one percent waiting that was for chatter which has now been renamed collaboration at least in the exam guide.

So that's where you get into feeds and groups and activity management which has to do with taskin events and even cloud scheduler which cloud schedulers on the way out.

But also you'll see things in this course that are still reflected in the exam guide even though they've been retired by Salesforce and so I try to make notes around that so that you know there's some things that may not even be available in your own free developer or Trailhead count.

And so I've left those in this core strategically because it still may be appearing on the exam and it seems like the questions really lagged behind because as an admin you'll be tasked with inheriting organizations that have been around for years and sometimes there'll be legacy functionality that Salesforce retire that you still have access to and so you need to be able to administer on those older things.

I had a student just the other day messaged me about really old mobile version of Salesforce that I thought had been retired for years and had been retired for years.

But there were still a question on the exam about it.

So I have those kind of things in this course so I want to make you aware of that.

Next is data management.

That's where we get into some fun things with data manipulation and uploading or asserting inserting

records deleting etc..

And there's a lot that you'll have to do as an admin and the data management space.

And then we get into reports and dashboards and that has a pretty significant weighting as well you'll have questions on the exam related to the different types of reports the different types of dashboards.

So understanding all of that's very important to passing the test.

And then we've got workflow and process automation This is one that's been recently renamed.

We're starting to get more hands around the process builder.

And that's a newer automation tool available in cells for us and it's called lightening process builder.

And so they've renamed this workflow slash process automation because we're going beyond workflow rules now into the process builder and understand what you can do with each of those tools is very helpful.

We go into all that in that section.

And then finally we've got a few other one percenters here we've got desktop a mobile administration and app Exchange.

So that should be 12 knowledge areas.

Let me check that real quick.

Yes so we've got the well knowledge areas concluding with desktop or mobile administration and AppExchange I would not be surprised to see Salesforce combine these two in the next release or two.

So the main thing is if the exam guide and you're taking this course does not exactly match up with what you see on the screen it is going to be fun because the concepts that are covered in this course are still the same and you can always find the latest exam guide that go into certification that sells for stock.

And clicking on the administrator track and selecting administrator and then just look for the Exam Guide link.

So now that you've gotten a brief overview of the exam guide an idea of what lies ahead.

Let's jump into the next section of this course.