After a decade in the Salesforce ecosystem, I’ve seen the highs of explosive growth and the recent wave of disillusionment among experienced professionals. Many seasoned folks today feel jaded – not because Salesforce isn’t innovative, but because innovation sometimes overshadows the basics that still need fixing. You often see that sentiment on IdeaExchange, where ideas have languished for decades with little to no love.
The next thing is opportunities – there’s no denying that the opportunities and salaries we saw during the pandemic are no longer there. There are a lot of interesting articles about this on Salesforce Ben. Billing rates for independent or freelance consultants have plummeted. If you’re a Sales or Service Cloud consultant, that’s no longer enough. You need to deepen your expertise or specialize quickly to stay relevant. This level of rapid upskilling was something that I hadn’t seen in the last decade. “Learn Revenue Cloud today because CPQ is going away” is the kind of urgency I’m seeing.
I’ve always been of the mindset that you have to constantly reinvent your career by learning something new every few years – if not every year. Let’s be honest, you can’t be an expert by doing something for just a year. It takes you years to become an expert plumber or electrician, and the same holds true for Salesforce. So, while learning something new is important to keep yourself marketable and your job interesting, it’s become all the more essential.
I’ll share some of my learnings from the last couple of years that will hopefully help professionals like myself who are wondering what the next 5, 10, or 20 years hold for us.
Learn New Products Within the Ecosystem
The first obvious thing is to upskill, as I’ve said before – that is, if you plan to be in the ecosystem. I don’t think the days of Salesforce are numbered, but look at trends to see which Salesforce products are in demand or which Salesforce skills are in short supply. There are tons of research and good articles in Salesforce Ben suggesting what is hot on a yearly basis. This should give you an idea of where to go next. Our ecosystem has tons of learning resources in the form of dev orgs, learning orgs, how-to articles, and a community that’s genuinely interested in helping. While not all products have mature content, it’s still relatively better than any other ecosystem.
You may hate Agentforce, and Dreamforce will only perpetuate that feeling even more, but upskill in it so that you are aware of its capabilities, and if you are thrown into an Agentforce project, you will find yourself in a good spot and maybe even do some cool stuff.
Maintenance Mode Orgs
A growing trend I’ve seen over the last few years is that Salesforce environments are going into maintenance mode. Customers who have had Salesforce for the last ten or more years are at an interesting juncture:
- Should we abandon our existing, overly customized Salesforce org and move to a new one? Or…
- Should we maintain our solutions in the existing org?
There are opportunities for experienced Salesforce folks in both these realms. In the former case, where a customer wants to abandon their existing home and move to a new one, they need experienced people to understand their current technical landscape, analyze the business process, and see what can be optimized in the new org. This is assuming that the customer even wants to stay with Salesforce – and often, end users who are used to Salesforce love it and want to continue using it, even if it means moving to a new environment. This presents an opportunity not only to improve and future-proof clients with newer offerings (such as moving from workflow rules to flows or new APIs for Apex) but also to migrate data from one org to another.
Another trend is that existing customers are constantly being marketed newer offerings by Salesforce – this is the truth, whether you like it or not. When this situation arises, the customer may ask you to jump in and implement, or provide admin assistance to get them up and running. This presents an opportunity to learn and implement something new or, if you already have the expertise, to put your skills to use and show your value right away.
When it comes to maintaining the existing org, examine business processes that are no longer valid. In an analysis for an existing client, we saw that one Opportunity record type was no longer used, but there was an automation that still converted a Lead to Account, Contact, and Opportunity, and the Opportunity was marked Closed Lost manually or left to languish – leading to reporting that showed open opportunities from 2018 and 2019, or tons of $0 Closed Lost Opportunities.
Look for opportunities (no pun intended) where legacy processes no longer make sense in the organization, and take initiatives to clean up the environment so that your users get value and reporting by executives remains trustworthy. I’ve seen a heavy bias in the ecosystem about which tools to use and why a solution wasn’t implemented properly, but there is little conversation about the business process itself and how the evolution of business processes needs technological changes to support it.
Another area where I spent a lot of time upskilling is DevOps and getting comfortable with VS Code. While there are some sophisticated tools and some really great and approachable people in the ecosystem who work day and night developing and advocating for better DevOps, knowing VS Code – not to code, but to use it as a tool to understand Salesforce and deploy your changes – is something I found immensely helpful and that helped me become more efficient.
Expand Beyond Salesforce: Leverage and Build Transferable Skills
One of the biggest realizations for many experienced Salesforce professionals is that the skills we’ve built over the years are highly transferable. Problem-solving, stakeholder management, business analysis, data modeling, solution design, and project delivery – these aren’t just “Salesforce skills”; they’re professional skills that apply across industries and technologies.
Whether you choose to learn complementary tools like MuleSoft, Snowflake, or Tableau, or pivot into adjacent roles such as product management, business architecture, or consulting leadership, your Salesforce foundation gives you a strong advantage. The key is to recognize the broader value of what you already know and continue building on it. The more you can connect your Salesforce expertise to business strategy and cross-platform thinking, the more resilient and future-proof your career becomes.
Read More
- Free Salesforce Training Resources
- Why Even Senior Salesforce Professionals Are Struggling to Find Work (And How to Overcome This)
- Here Are Your Salesforce Job Trends for 2025
- The State of Salesforce Technical Careers in 2025
Summary
The Salesforce ecosystem has matured, but so have we. Whether through learning new clouds, helping clients modernize, or improving long-standing orgs, there’s still immense opportunity for those who evolve with the platform rather than resist it. The next decade will belong to the professionals who combine experience with curiosity.
Be open-minded in your journey, be optimistic – yet not foolishly optimistic – and see trends in the industry, carving out a niche that keeps you both relevant and in demand.
