Salesforce 401 Certification what will help me?

Do this. . .NOT this

First of all, there are several things which helped a lot, and there were many more which didn't help at all - not one bit. Here's a short list of things you need to keep in mind when taking the 401 certification.

Forget about trying to Memorize stuff

If you think you're going to just memorize a bunch of facts and figures about the salesforce.com platform and breeze through this test, you are sadly mistaken. I watched all of the podcast videos (located here) and my first time through figured I could just memorize the stuff like the 8 things Profiles control and through extrapolation could render th right answer - WRONG! My first attempt the pass the test was a miserable failure and showed me many shortcomings of how I studied for the test. First the do's:

This helped:

• DO watch the 401 training videos
• DO learn the basics of how databases woork
• DO read the Force.com Fundamental PDF
• DO the tutorials in the Force.com Fundamentals PDF (located here)

This DID NOT help:

• Trying to memorize everything
• Not doing any of the examples in the Force.com Fundamentals PDF
• Actually thinking the SFDC materials (their lame study guide, located here) would help me focus on certain topics which would be covered in the test. WRONG!
• Thinking the test exams was a good ruler for how well you will do on the test. I found out many of these test are written by people in India who do not have a great handle on the English language. All it did was confuse me when I saw the actual test questions.
• Thinking everything on the test was contained in the Force.com Fundamentals and the videos

You read that last part right. There are several questions I saw on each test where the answer was not in any of the materials available. Not only that, but after the test I asked several of my co-workers (who all had more than 5+ years working on the SFDC platform) these same questions and guess what? THEY didn't even know the right answers!! Man, talk about being pissed and frustrated. But it got better. . sort of.

Things you should be aware of. .

After taking the test several times and finally passing, I came to the conclusion Salesforce.com really doesn't want you to pass the test, and they clearly don't want to have more developers with a 401 or a 501 certification. With other certifications I've taken, the vendor will tell you how you did, and point out areas of the test you were weak so you could study those areas more, and be prepared to pass the test. This, unfortunately is not the case with SFDC. You either pass or you fail. They don't tell you what your score was, or what area's you were strong in. It leaves you totally in the dark. You could have been one question away from passing, or you could have just narrowly passed it. Either way, they don't help you out at all in trying to pass the test.

Overall, what I think finally put over the edge was getting some good time working on the SFDC platform. Getting as much real world experience on the platform is important. Just as a point of interest, we had several back end developers start around the time I was taking the test. All 5 of them had extensive back-end (Java) experience and passed the test the first time, all with about 6-8 months of SFDC experience. The four front end guys we have all had to take the test multiple times before we passed (with virtually no back-end or OOP (object oriented programming) experience. So When I hear SFDC tell you, you don't need any programming experience to pass this test, I say BULLSHIT.

Next post - get the rest of the details on the test. . .