Almost all Salesforce professionals are drawn to the ecosystem because they have an appetite for expanding their horizons of knowledge, discovering the power at their fingertips. But it doesn’t have to stop at Salesforce certifications and accreditations.
Non-Salesforce certifications can enhance your core role while providing a helpful competitive edge to your resume. These could be companies that Salesforce has partnerships with – or, you could even check out the competition to gain valuable intel.
As well as proving your prowess with timeless best practices, multiple certifications featured here reflect prominent trends – such as AI. We asked the Salesforce community on LinkedIn for their recommendations, grouped them into disciplines, and formed the list you’ll find here.
“I have had help from having certifications to Salesforce’s direct competitors. It doesn’t hurt to know their weaknesses and strengths – after all, you may end up building integrations with them or trying to position Salesforce against them.” Timo Kovala, Lead Architect at Capgemini
Business Analysis: Requirements Gathering and Process Mapping
Business analysis isn’t only for business analysts. As Salesforce orgs become more complex (and organizations increase investment into it!), business analysis is key for other roles – such as consultants and admins – to master.
Requirements gathering is the process of collecting information about what the business needs and translating that into what the technology should achieve. Process mapping is taking that information and laying it out as steps in a process that users or automation will follow (understanding BPMN and UML concepts is part of this). When both are executed correctly, it means that you confirm what will be implemented and, therefore, are not setting yourself up for failure. Plus, as Ian Gotts pointed out, being skilled-up is even more important for projects involving AI.
- IREB: Offers the Certified Professional for Requirements Gathering (CPRE) and Digital Design Professional (DDP) certifications, with over 1,200 training sessions occurring per year.
- IIBA: Offers multiple certifications arranged in a pathway to progression. Their four-step guide is a useful starting point.
Project Management
Ensuring projects run smoothly is another skill that is adjacent to multiple roles within the Salesforce ecosystem. This category of certifications will cover trends and practices with project management tools, processes, and methods, including the following areas:
- Controlling and leading a project
- Time and skills management to ensure project completion
- Planning the project to maximize efficiency
- Managing teams from across the globe – focusing on how to be an effective team player beyond your local environment
- Managing resources efficiently to achieve the end goal with minimal cost and waste
Plus, “Agile” as a skill ranked number five in our SF Ben Salesforce Salary Survey Results 2024-25. Here are some specific favorites of the Salesforce community:
- Project Management Professional (PMP)
- Scrum Master/Scrum, e.g. Scrum Alliance (Product Owner and Scrum Master)
- Certified Change Management Certification (CCMP)
Design Thinking and User Experience
User Research: Generative is a partnership launched in 2022. Codecademy (a pro-code training course provider) and Miro (a virtual collaboration platform/whiteboarding tool) joined forces to equip UX developers with the tools and skills (creativity!) they need to design for people. The course is free and beginner-friendly.
Architecture Certifications
When planning system architecture, it’s important to get it right the first time. Being a Salesforce Architect involves understanding a wide range of concepts, so it’s imperative to broaden your scope of knowledge. A Salesforce org is rarely an island – with a typical org growing in integrations between other platforms – especially with Data Cloud being all the rage.
Here are some platform-specific and platform-agnostic credentials the Salesforce community recommends:
- TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework): Beneficial for architects to align with global standards. The credentials are based around the TOGAF Standard, a proven methodology and framework used by the world’s leading organizations, and the TOGAF Library, which contains guidelines, templates, patterns, and other forms of reference material.
- ITIL: “An adaptable framework for managing services, optimizing digital technologies to co-create value with consumers, drive business strategy, and embrace digital transformation”. Once the ITIL 4 Foundation has been achieved, there are multiple certification streams to pursue.
- Azure: As a popular platform for building applications, many organizations opt to host their technologies on Azure. With a long list of certifications available, the diagram below will help you to navigate these paths or use the role-based sections create your learning journey.
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP): With three certifications available for organizations basing their business on the Google suite, there’s more here than just for architects, including Practitioners and Engineers in the Data, Cloud, Architecture, and DevOps remits (these are listed under each of the certifications to guide you).
- Zachman: This certification is based on a framework that ultimately describes an organization. It guides you through collating the question words (what/how/where/who/when/why) and describing these from the perspective of disciplines or collection of roles (e.g. the business management perspective). The course is a mix of online prep work in our Virtual University and three days of live instruction. Thanks to Timo Kovala for this new entry to the list.
Spotlight: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
This is the baseline certification, offering a “foundational understanding of AWS Cloud concepts, services, and terminology. This is a good starting point for individuals in non-technical roles with no prior IT or cloud experience or for those with on-premises IT experience looking for basic AWS Cloud fluency.” Getting Started with Amazon S3 is another option that could prove useful.
Why AWS, you may be thinking? You’d be surprised how many Salesforce products are built on AWS – and with Hyperforce expanding into more regions, there will be a new appetite to learn about the largest cloud services provider.
View all the certifications that AWS offers here.
Cybersecurity
Threats to the security of your organization’s data are growing both in number and sophistication. This certification was highlighted by Laura Formby, and others agreed with her recommendation as well.
- ISC2: The International Information System Security Certification Consortium is a world-recognized organization offering a range of certifications – from fundamentals through to architecting with security at the forefront.
Data Analytics and Visualization
Data skills are one way to give your CV a competitive edge, especially being able to work with large data sets and think critically about what data is representing (and whether it’s correct!). Generally speaking, proficiency in SQL is becoming more sought after as Data Cloud grows in importance and popularity.
- Certified Analytics Professional (CAP): Covers the technical expertise and related soft skills across the seven domains of analytics. It is a credential for accomplished analytics and data science professionals.
- CCA Data Analyst: In this hands-on exam, you are given challenges to solve, with a unique large data set and a CDH cluster. The certification was originally developed to identify talented SQL developers, but is suitable for a number of roles, including data analysts, business intelligence specialists, system architects, and database administrators.
- Tableau and Power BI: Two prominent leaders in the business intelligence space. Take a dip into the certifications from Tableau (a Salesforce tool) and perhaps the Power BI Data Analyst Associate – remember what Timo said in the introduction about trying out competitor products.
DevOps
There are Salesforce partners offering modules that are not Salesforce-specific and can be transferable (i.e. are platform agnostic). Copado (which ranked no. 1 in our SF Ben Salesforce Salary Survey), DevOps Launchpad (by Gearset), and Flosum are solid examples to explore.
The DevOps Institute offers a range of internationally recognized certifications that are a must if you’re planning to become highly specialized in sub-displines such as DevSecOps. Thanks to Maciek Ogrodnik for this new entry to the list.
RevOps
Revenue-generating teams – and the processes surrounding them – are clearly key to any business. With Salesforce being a suite that spans the RevOps lifecycle, most professionals are pulled into RevOps naturally (even if it’s not labelled on their job description!) Again, this is an area you can really give yourself a competitive advantage – after all, making improvements that support revenue generation won’t go unnoticed.
- Revenue Architecture Certification (Winning By Design): Geared towards ‘revenue leaders’, this covers fundamental principles such as recurring revenue, and frameworks to apply across your GTM (go-to-market) team. Thanks to David VanHeukelom for this new entry to the list.
- Hubspot RevOps Course: A personal favorite of mine – this free course walks you through the core concepts of RevOps. It demystifies what RevOps is, who it involves, how to generate stakeholder buy-in, process mapping, and how good practices compound over time (the ‘flywheel’). In my opinion, some of the introductory videos are also helpful for explaining to people what you do for a living!
AI
- IBM Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals: Covers AI concepts such as natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, chatbots, and neural networks – and also, beyond simply the technology, AI ethics and the applications of AI. Thanks to Darren Ferneyhough for this new entry to the list, who said: “Was quite in depth and satisfying. Great insight into the wider aspects of artificial intelligence that rounds out knowledge nicely alongside the Salesforce AI functionality and certs”.
Excel
Even though it’s 2025, ask an average Salesforce professional and they’ll tell you they still rely on Excel skills to do their work – after all, this article on Excel skills is one of our all-time top performers! If you’re interested in learning more, take a look at this article. Microsoft Excel Associate and Expert certification levels are available across various Excel editions – find the one that’s relevant for you here.
Summary
There are hundreds of courses and credentials you can pursue as a Salesforce professional. This list has included the most popular, and those adjacent to multiple roles in the ecosystem.
Thanks to everyone in the Salesforce community who contributed to the LinkedIn conversation – we appreciate you all!
And if you’re feeling the motivation to learn (and then learn some more), here is a list of certifications from Salesforce app partners (ISVs) to explore:
