Salesforce Accredited Professional Pathways

February 8, 2023
Pardot Certifications, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

Nearly two years have passed since Salesforce announced the Accredited Professional program. These credentials are designed to prove your extensive knowledge in a specific area of the Salesforce platform, and are exclusively available for Salesforce partners. There are close to 40 Salesforce accreditations. Salesforce accredited professionals span platform, sales, service, commerce, industries, and marketing.

If you were to look at a list of Salesforce accredited pathways, you may notice that they focus on products and features that are emerging and/or are challenging to master – after all, these are the skill sets that prompt organizations to seek external consultants in the first place!

This guide will compare accreditations versus certifications, introduce the Salesforce Accredited Professional pathways, and give you an example of what it takes to achieve an accreditation.

Salesforce Accredited Professional vs. Certification

Accredited Professional exams: Available to Salesforce Partners (you need access to the Partner Learning Camp). These demonstrate skills with specific features, from Sales Cloud Einstein to Process Automation. The exams consist of a varying number of questions, and time is allocated based on the number of questions.
Salesforce certifications (Trailhead Exams): Available for everyone. These demonstrate breadth in a subject matter (e.g. Pardot Consultant) or Salesforce role (e.g. Business Analyst).

Salesforce Accredited Professional Pathways

Salesforce accreditations can be categorized by function/product, which means you can target the areas that align best with your role and career progression.

You may find that having experience in one particular platform area will help you along your accreditation journey. Plus, there are certain prerequisites involved: i.e. credentials you need to achieve first before moving on to the next.

Compared with certifications, which Salesforce state recommended years of experience, we’ve designed the Salesforce accreditations pathways to not be linear. You’ll see that the circles group product/skill areas with certification prerequisites indicated for the few that have them enforced:

Thanks to Tom Bassett for his insight on Salesforce accreditations.

Salesforce Platform Accreditations

Salesforce Sales Accreditations

Salesforce Service Accreditations

Salesforce Industries Accreditations

Salesforce Marketing Accreditations

Salesforce Commerce Accreditations

Salesforce Accreditation Example: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Reporting & Analytics

To give you a glimpse of what’s involved with gaining a Salesforce accreditation, Tom wrote about his experience of studying and passing Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Reporting & Analytics (formerly Pardot).

This is an example of an accreditation that has a certification prerequisite (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Specialist, formerly Pardot Specialist).

Summary

Salesforce accreditations are a great way to demonstrate your knowledge of particular areas of Salesforce. With plenty of pathways to choose from, you can get up to speed on plenty of key skills.

It’s important to check whether your accreditation needs a prerequisite accreditation beforehand, and you can check this through the diagram. Happy studying!

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