More Salesforce certifications are released every year, and if you’re like some Trailblazers, you might have the urge to catch them all!
Here’s a Salesforce certification map to help you guide your career journey. You’ll find the recommended experience and prerequisite certifications needed to progress to the next stage. Which path will you choose?
Dividing the certifications into pathways was not an easy task – what this proves is that a career with Salesforce can take many different turns. Trailblazers can choose their next step from a range of options.
We chose the following paths, and gave them each a color:
- Associate
- Admin/Specialist
- Developer
- Consultant
- Architect
- Marketer
- Designer
- Artificial Intelligence
Although you can blaze your own career path, there are rules that must be followed. Some certifications have prerequisites (certifications that you need to pass before attempting your target certification), which form the backbone of the pathways. For example, before you can take the Advanced Administrator exam, you must have passed the Certified Administrator exam.
The dotted lines show which certifications are related to each other, but are not strictly prerequisites. We didn’t want to leave these path options off the certification landscape!
You will find the recommended experience in months or years on each certification, in line with Salesforce’s suggestion. An important approach to certifications is for candidates to have real-life experience working with these products.
Certifications may be one thing, but the hands-on, tangible experience will be more valuable in the long run – something that is hard to test in a multiple-choice exam. However, Salesforce has written their questions to filter out inexperienced professionals.
A couple of outliers to note:
- CPQ Specialist: Neither a core administrator nor a consultant.
- Platform App Builder: Part of the architect pathway, but most popular among admins.
Also, as part of Salesforce’s AI for All initiative, everyone can take the Agentforce Specialist certification exam once for free until December 31, 2025. Also, it is worth noting that the AI Associate certification will be retired in February 2026, with the new ‘Agentblazer Status’ program set to replace it.
Summary
The Salesforce certification pathways offer a variety of options for Trailblazers to enhance their careers, with each path providing unique opportunities. While prerequisites and real-world experience are key factors in advancing, the flexibility of the pathways allows for personalization.
No matter which direction you choose, Salesforce certifications can serve as a valuable tool to unlock new career possibilities and growth.
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