Salesforce dropped a key update yesterday: 24 certifications are being retired, and 16 more are (you guessed it) getting renamed. A big chunk of the Salesforce ecosystem comprises of certified professionals, as well as those planning to take more certs.
So if you’ve been sitting on a study plan, you’ll want to read this carefully, because it takes time to rethink your review schedule, and the deadlines are closer than you might think.
What’s Happening?
As of yesterday’s post on the 360 blog, two things are happening here: certification retirement and renaming. It’s worth thinking of them separately because they will affect you in different ways:
16 certifications are being renamed, effective July 24, 2026. This is mostly cosmetic, because if you find your certification in this list, trust that its content will not change, and you don’t need to retake anything. Looking at the list, it appears Salesforce is aligning names with their current product portfolio (Agentforce is showing up in most of the new cert names) and cleaning up inconsistent naming across the catalog. You can check out the full list here.
24 certifications are being fully retired on February 1, 2027. While the due date seems far off, this one calls for more urgency because the last day to register for any of these exams is July 24 of this year, while the final day to actually sit the exam is August 31. After that, the window closes permanently. You can check out the full list here.
What Happens to the Retired Certifications?
I know it’s easy to worry when you find that one or more of your certifications are on the list, but Salesforce has made it explicitly clear in their announcement that a retired certification is still a valid certification. Trust that it won’t be wiped from your Trailblazer profile, and it will still appear in the verification system, so employers can still look it up.
Retirement is merely a part of the certification lifecycle, and it just means Salesforce will no longer maintain or update the exam – it does not erase the effort you’ve put into achieving it!
Well, what happens to my cert maintenance, you might ask. Maintenance for the cert will cease as well, so you won’t be able to renew it in future maintenance cycles. Eventually, it’ll represent a skill set Salesforce has formally moved away from.
Why Is Salesforce Doing This?
Quite frankly, the short answer is Agentforce. This is evident in a big chunk of the renamed certs. Salesforce has been very transparent that their certification strategy (and honestly everything else) is pivoting hard toward AI and agentic use cases.
When they retire a certification, it’s typically because the underlying product has changed enough that the old exam no longer tests what the market actually needs, or because a newer credential has superseded it.
The rename wave follows the same logic. Adding “Agentforce” to certification names signals that these credentials are being repositioned to reflect where Salesforce’s product portfolio is currently positioned. This isn’t the first time Salesforce has done this either. The AI Associate cert was retired earlier this year as Agentblazer Status took its place. The difference now is the scale of it: 24 retirements at once is significant! No wonder the community feels it.
What the Community Thinks
The announcement landed on Reddit about as well as you’d expect. The image above is from a thread titled “Thanks, I hate it”, referring to the renames. As of this writing, it has racked up 245 upvotes, with the top comment cutting straight to the point: “The amount of chaos and panicked backtracking that Salesforce will have to do once the AI bubble pops will be a legendary thing to watch.”
The community’s core frustration doesn’t seem to be coming from the name changes themselves, but more from what the new names imply. The original poster called it “straight up lying”, as they have two of the listed certs and never touched Agentforce. It just goes to show that professionals who built careers on products before Agentforce existed (like Sales and Service Cloud) will now carry credentials that suggest otherwise.
Another thread came up on the retirement side of things. The reactions hit differently, and are less angry, but more genuinely gutted. CPQ kept coming up with comments like “Man, rip to CPQ. That was the product that started my Salesforce career.” and “Retiring CPQ is brutal considering how hard I had to work to pass that damn thing.”
The NPSP Consultant retirement seems to have stung, too, particularly for people who are in the middle of studying for it or actively supporting customers who haven’t migrated to Nonprofit Cloud yet.
Education Cloud got called out as well, with one comment noting there’s no successor cert being offered for it, just a recommendation to go study Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), which is a pretty cold pivot.
There’s also the practical side to it, mainly around frustration from some people who had just gotten employer approval to expense these exams when the announcement dropped.
To be fair, not everyone was reaching for the pitchforks. A few voices in the comments were pragmatic and a little bit positive, noting that retired certs still stay on your profile anyway, or that the NPC Consultant exam is reportedly easier than the NPSP one.
Another comment even said at least the email Salesforce sent was useful enough to flag exactly which certs were going to be affected without making you dig for it. Small mercies.
Final Thoughts
24 retirements are a lot to absorb in one announcement. But to be frank about it, this is actually Salesforce being more organized about something that was already happening in the background. There have been so many product renames revolving around Agentforce lately, and it’s about time that the certifications caught up.
If anything, the cert renames have just proven that the Agentforce pivot is real, and that if you’ve been putting off thinking about what your certification roadmap looks like in a post-Agentforce world, this announcement is your signal that time’s up.
