From non-IT to CTA: my journey in Salesforce

To say that a career in IT was not at all where 6-year old me would have expected to end up, would be an understatement. While I always loved video games, I wasn’t particularly tech-savvy or even remotely interested in the inner workings of technology growing up. The IT I learned in high school wasn’t really thrilling for me, it felt boring and far removed from my day-to-days and any of my interests. Being expected to know the world well enough at 18 to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life is a high ask to say the least. Especially as so many of the possible directions seemed quite foreign to 18-year old me.

So I chose to study languages (English and Spanish), because I loved and love to read. Slowly I started to get a better view on where my interests lied. While I fully expected to lean more towards the literature part of the curriculum, I learned that the ‘technical’ side of language was more my thing; even going so far as completing an internship on Psycholinguistics and Multilingualism at University Hospital Jette.

As the demand for (psycho)linguists wasn’t exactly high in the job market, I worked in a few different administrative jobs (one of which included some very basic content maintenance on the organisation’s website in HTML). However, I felt like something was missing. I wanted to be able to create something. So I returned to the school benches to study Multimedia & Communication Technology at Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel as a working student. This was a revelation, it taught me that IT can be fun and creative and that I was actually not bad at it.?

Towards the end of my studies, I had a slow semester which I decided to spice up by taking my first steps in the IT job market in a student job. One of the companies I was talking to was a Salesforce partner who sent me a series of Trailhead trails to take a look at and see if Salesforce was something for me. Trailhead was love at first sight and so exciting that I completed all the recommended trails in just one week. Needless to say, I got the job and got hooked on Trailhead and Salesforce in the process.

Certifications to navigate my study and my career

Starting as a Salesforce Consultant / Developer, I began by writing some Apex here and there in the background before jumping into the more client-facing side of consulting. I learned about certification early on and they became a way for me to direct my Trailhead adventures towards a clear goal and focus my self-study. While some may take certifications to mould their project experience into tangible proof of their knowledge and expertise, I did not necessarily have all this experience at the time. I took certifications as my guiding star in discovering areas and products of Salesforce which I could use for my clients or just found interesting and used the certification exam as a test to see how well I understood and knew the topic.

This approach worked well in getting to know Salesforce a lot better, but also accelerated my growth as I took the knowledge I had acquired along the way into my projects. It gave me the confidence to be more proactive, ask more questions and raise potential risks which led to more opportunities opening up to take on more responsibilities and in turn learn and grow faster.

When I heard about the Certified Technical Architect pyramid, it introduced me to the concept of architects and expanded my certification roadmap to work towards this clear goal: becoming a CTA. As you can read in The Why of the CTA Journey, my motivations to go for the CTA kept evolving over time as I started to better and better understand the commitment necessary to be successful in this journey and what it meant to be an architect. Each of the prerequisite certifications helped me look at things from more of an end-to-end and overarching way, increased my sense of ownership of clients' systems and allowed me to take on my first architect tasks.

I took the first prerequisite certification in 2019 during the Application Architect Bootcamp (ARC901) at TrailheaDX (now renamed to TrailblazerDX) and completed the last prerequisite certification in 2020. As soon as I started doing mocks and talking to other people on the journey to CTA, I knew I still had quite some work to do. The naive idea that the pyramid is the tough part and that all that’s left afterwards is taking the board was quickly shattered. It made me realise I had rushed through the pyramid more than I should have. While I might have been able to understand the content of the prerequisite exams enough to identify the right answers in a multiple choice exam format, the same could not be said in terms of actually applying this knowledge and starting from scratch in creating a solution design. Of course, I had the project experience to complement my knowledge on some of the domains, but was still quite green on others.

Because of the great experience I had had with the ARC-901 and because I felt less confident in the system architect leg of the pyramid, I decided to take the System Domain Architect Workshop (ARC902). The power of both courses lies in the people who are there with you: an expert (CTA) instructor who can explain tough topics clearly and a group of attendees eager to learn more and relate the content back to their experiences. Hearing other attendees share their experiences on their projects, the pitfalls and how they solved them combined with the instructor’s advice and insights helped put everything in perspective. I still had some ways to go in terms of getting ready for the board though as knowledge is only part of the preparation.

FlowRepublic and many, many hours of self-study, group and community sessions and mocks helped me grow in terms of communication, time management and architect mindset. Purely applying the knowledge on a scenario is not enough, you have to really look at it from an architect’s perspective and make sure the hypothetical project and architecture is robust, scalable and user-friendly.

Last leg towards the CTA

After years of building towards this goal, I got a date for my review board. Passing the - at that time optional - Review Board Readiness Diagnostic (CTA602V) had given me some confidence and feedback that I was on the right track, but seeing the actual date in front of me was still quite daunting. So I got to work on a plan on how to tackle the remaining weeks, reached out to CTA and aspiring CTA friends alike to judge my mocks and reserved some time at the end to make sure I was fit on the day of.?

The day of the review board flew by, but I felt good. My time management paid off and I managed to complete all parts within the allocated time. I was in good spirits and surrounded by kind and helpful people. As my proctor for the day, Suzanne Ferguson was with me the entire time, guiding me through the various parts of the board which made me more at ease with the virtual nature of the board. My husband, Robrecht Dewaele, was my personal IT helpdesk, logistics operations, catering services and mental health guru all rolled into one. When I mentioned to him during a break that the ‘exam’ room was growing quite hot, I came back to find not one, but three fans parked outside of the door.

Waiting for the results was uncomfortable to put it mildly. I can’t count how many times I dreamed of having received the results and went through the various possible outcomes. A clock indicating the San Francisco time was usually open somewhere in my browser to keep an eye on the likelihood of receiving the email throughout the day. Night time rituals had begun including checking my email before going to bed and doing the same when waking up at night and in the morning. Friends and family were curious as well, so an abundance of ‘did you get it yet?’ messages didn’t do much to help my efforts in distracting myself.

Try again

I ended up getting the results the evening before my birthday (about two weeks after the exam) and got a partial pass. The integration domain had been a fail so I would need to take that one again. There were some mixed feelings at first because I felt overwhelmed thinking of gearing up again for the board and the energy it would take, but great people like Seb Wagner, Nadina Lisbon, Kathryn Chlosta and Sergey Erlikh helped me find the energy and motivation (or kick in the butt) I needed. I got back to work, trying to figure out my integration gaps and how to tackle a one-section retake (which is considerably shorter than a full board). Gianluca Calcagni and Chetan Chugh were my study buddies along the way which really helped clarify various topics on either content or format side of the retake. I went through a lot of trial and error in deciding the story and artefacts I wanted to bring for the retake, but ended up getting a flow that worked for me.?

After getting the date, I got back to making a plan for the remaining weeks. All the while, I kept going over the feedback I had gotten from my first board. The remarks I had not fully understood at first, started to make more and more sense. This showed me that I was growing stronger and filling those gaps I had not been aware of before and put me in a good headspace to tackle the board again.

The retake review board went in a very similar way as the first one had: time management went well, everyone was friendly and kind. Of course, there were some tough questions, but I felt I had done the best I could and would now need to wait for the results (again) and see. The wait again had its share of sleepless nights, but finally I got the good news that I had passed the board and had achieved my goal of becoming a CTA.

My journey to CTA was so much more than I could ever have expected. I discovered strengths and potential in myself I couldn’t have imagined and achieved goals I wouldn’t have known were possible. I discovered the strength of the community and got so much help along the way. The collaborative spirit of the Salesforce community made me feel less alone during some of the tougher parts of my journey. Seeing my CTA heroes continue to give back made me want to do the same. Even though I have shared my journey countless times - to the point I cannot imagine anyone is still interested in hearing it again - I keep on getting messages from people who got value out of me sharing it yet again. This is what keeps me going and inspires me to urge others to share their experiences, insights and knowledge as well: because you never know who you might inspire and who they might inspire in turn.

The talks

If you’re still with me and want to hear (specific parts of) my story again, you may want to check out these session I participated in:

• Develop the mindset to provide the best architecture | Inspiring Ohana Talk with Lilith Van Biesen
• Road to Architect: Leverage Your Admin and Dev Skills to Begin Your Architectural Learning Journey
• Take Two - Cracking the CTA Review Board Re-Take with Lilith, James & Chetan!
• Journey to Salesforce CTA (Build Your Career in Salesforce- Part 12)
• Lilith Van Biesen on her Salesforce CTA journey and lifting others up on their own
• My Journey to Salesforce CTA and how you can tackle yours