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posted: September 7, 2024
tl;dr: Using sample tests to direct my studying is what worked for me...
Yesterday I passed the exam to become a Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Administrator.
Some people get as many certifications as they can, to beef up their resumes and improve their career prospects. I’m the other end of the spectrum: I rarely go through the bother of studying, taking classes, and passing a certification test. I’d rather just use a tool, learning as I go, and thereby studying just what I need to perform my job and the tasks at hand. Occasionally I get asked to become certified, as I was in this case, and I go through the process. I should probably do it more often.
I work for a digital marketing agency, and we use Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) on behalf of clients, primarily for email and SMS (text message) marketing. I’ve used it for years - here is the critique I wrote back in 2022. The “SFMC quirks” document mentioned in that post is now up to 35 pages in length. SFMC is a complex tool. Salesforce keeps adding additional functionality to expand it well beyond its original role. They also keep giving it all sorts of features applicable to large enterprises. This strategy may be working: as judged solely by the clients of the agency I work for, SFMC is growing in popularity.
I’ve set up and configured SFMC, operated it, created and sent emails with it, and written a variety of pipelines and automations to get data into and out of it. I’ve researched and solved a variety of issues with it (hence the “SFMC quirks” document). There are several different SFMC certifications, and given my role at the agency, it made sense for me to go for the “administrator” certification.
It would have been very difficult to get the administrator certification without having spent a fair bit of time using SFMC. Operating SFMC is not my full time job by any stretch, but I have used it for years. My direct experience with SFMC prepared me for a bit over half the questions on the test, I estimate. But even for those questions, the test makers sometimes word the question and possible answers in a tricky fashion. Passing requires an overall score of 67% correct. So I would have to study. But what?
I started by taking the two short “cert prep” modules for Marketing Cloud Admin on Salesforce Trailhead. As I went through the questions, if I didn’t know an answer or got it wrong, I went into SFMC itself and/or read the referenced documentation page to figure out the correct answer. I pretty quickly learned a couple facts: the functionality on the Setup page of SFMC is very important; and the test covers a wide variety of Salesforce products, some of which I had only heard about and a few that I didn’t even know existed. Also, the certification test is completely closed book, so I wouldn’t be able to use SFMC or read documentation during the real test. I was feeling a bit iffy at this point.
The cert prep modules were short, so I decided to try preparing for the test the same way I had prepared for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) back when I was in high school: by taking some practice tests, in full (60 questions in 1.5 hours). This ended up working for me. I found practice tests on salesforceben.com: three full tests for $19. I didn’t pass the first practice test, and I came closer on the second. The real benefits were familiarizing myself with the types of questions that are asked (hint: it appears that there is always a question on best practices for user login security), and directing my studying towards aspects of SFMC that are likely to appear on the test. It helped to know where to dive deep, and where a cursory understanding would suffice.
After a total of about twelve hours of studying and practice test taking, I took the certification exam, which costs $200. You can either take it in-person or online, and being a work-from-home person, I chose the latter. To help ensure that test takers do not cheat, the test is taken in a locked browser that is downloaded from the online exam company, Webassessor, with all other browsers closed. The test taker’s camera is on the entire time and is monitored in some fashion, either via AI or human operators or both. Early in my test the proctor interrupted me because I had neglected to remove my Fitbit, and digital wrist devices are not permitted. I resolved that issue to the satisfaction of the proctor and continued. I’m going to guess that they have other software that monitors cursor movements and how quickly the test taker answers questions. Being someone who truly believes that cheaters ultimately cheat themselves, I wasn’t going to cheat anyway. I would not recommend trying.
The actual certification test ended up being easier than the practice tests I had taken. Everything is multiple choice, but the practice tests always had four or five possible answers, and sometimes you had to choose more than one. For the actual test, there were only three possible answers, only one of which is correct. This improves the odds a lot. If you can eliminate one possible answer, then you’ve got a 50% chance of getting the question right, and a passing grade is 67%. A bunch of questions I knew I had answered correctly, and if I answered half the questions I was uncertain about correctly, I believed I would pass. Time was not an issue: there was plenty of time to review the questions I was uncertain about. After finalizing my answers I submitted my test and very quickly got my graded summary. I passed, by a decent margin.
This is what worked for me. Of course it won’t work for everyone. The overall experience wasn’t bad at all, and I may seek out more certifications in the near future.