Five years is a long time in the Salesforce ecosystem. In that time, you can go from learning the platform basics to designing enterprise architecture, leading teams, influencing strategy – or maybe just becoming far better at what you were doing in year one.
But beyond role- and cloud-specific skills for particular roles like administrator or developer, what skills should you have already developed at this point – and what should you prioritize now? Five years is a good moment to take a breath and consider the past and the future.
Five Years in What?
Evaldas Zaranka, Lead Salesforce & GTM Systems Architect at Wise and Salesforce Golden Hoodie Recipient, told SF Ben that the five-year point is a really interesting stage to assess a Salesforce career, because by then the conversation should move beyond simply counting years of experience, certifications, or job titles.
“For me, a good five-year ‘career MOT’ would look at whether someone’s scope and impact have genuinely expanded,” he said.
“Are they still primarily executing tickets and requirements, or can they challenge requirements, design scalable solutions, understand the wider business process and take ownership of outcomes?”
The strongest Salesforce professionals gradually move from knowing how to configure the platform to understanding why something should be built, how it fits into the wider architecture, and what commercial or operational problem it solves, Evaldas added.
We may also need to be careful when discussing what “five years of Salesforce experience” actually means, because five years in the AI era could look completely different from five years before it.
Someone starting their career today will be working in an environment where AI can accelerate configuration, documentation, solution design, testing, analysis and even development. That potentially allows people to progress much faster – but it also creates a new risk: people can produce outputs they don’t fully understand, Evaldas warned.
He added: “I think the benchmark is changing. In the past, knowing how to build something in Salesforce carried a lot of value.
“Going forward, the differentiator will increasingly be judgment: knowing what to build, what not to build, how to validate AI-generated work, how to design for scale and security, and how Salesforce fits into a much broader technology and data landscape.”
Five years of experience where somebody has actively used AI to multiply their learning and exposure could be far more valuable than five years of repeatedly doing the same type of work, he said.
Consultancy vs. End-User
Another important distinction is consultancy versus end-user experience. Five years in consultancy can give someone exposure to multiple industries, Salesforce clouds, architectures, stakeholders, and implementation approaches.
You may be able to compress a huge amount of variety into a relatively short period because you can work across several organizations and transformation programs.
“However, consultancy experience can sometimes mean you design and deliver something and then move on before seeing the long-term consequences of those decisions,” Evaldas said.
An end-user career can provide you with something different: ownership. This path means you live with the architecture, technical debt, adoption issues, operational processes and business outcomes over several years.
You learn what happens six, twelve or twenty-four months after a solution goes live – and tend to develop a much deeper understanding of one company’s commercial model, organizational politics, data and technology ecosystem.
“Neither route is inherently better,” says Evaldas. “Ideally, by year five, someone should have developed a combination of breadth and depth.
“The question I would ask is not simply ‘where have you worked for five years?’ but, ‘How many genuinely different problems have you solved, how much ownership have you had, and how has your decision-making matured?’”
Salary and title can be important indicators of progression, but not worth everything.
“I’d look much more closely at responsibility, decision-making authority, architectural depth, stakeholder management, commercial understanding and exposure to the wider ecosystem – integrations, data platforms, automation, AI and the broader GTM technology stack,” said Evaldas.
While someone can have an impressive title after five years, they still might have relatively narrow experience. The silver lining of that, for people without an impressive title, is that you may already be operating at architect or platform-lead level – so don’t fret just yet.
Ultimately, five years of experience should not mean doing five repetitions of year one. The real career audit is whether the complexity of the problems you can solve, the decisions you can make and the business impact you can own have materially increased.
Are You Listening to the Ecosystem?
Salesforce Architect Ambassador and author of A Complete Guide to Agentforce, Timo Kovala, told SF Ben that he has, since 2021, gone through at least four different roles in that timeframe: from Salesforce marketing consultant to team lead, from team lead to practice head, and then a switch towards Salesforce architecture, and broadening his focus towards Data 360 and Agentforce.
“A lot can happen in five years, and my advice is to listen closely to what’s happening in the ecosystem, and especially to your customers,” Timo said.
He added that, when you hear about a new tech like Claudeforce, it’s good to “keep a level head and not get sucked into the hype”. That being said, he still recommends trying your best to get early access to these new tools and platforms.
You don’t have to become a deep technical expert in every platform – such a thing would not even be possible – but forming an informed opinion and point of view is critical for every leading expert in the ecosystem. The best way to do this is to gain hands-on experience.
Timo says that, as a consultant, a good combination of roughly 50-70% billable work, 10-20% presales and go-to-market activities, and 10% self-learning is a winning combination. This gives you the confident backbone from building and running capabilities in production; the intense story-building and positioning viewpoint from presales; and the forward-looking visibility and established frameworks from online resources and certifications.
Final Thoughts
After five years, typically speaking, someone should be operating at senior scope, even if their employer has not actually given them a ‘senior’ title. It’s not really about whether you have a certain word on your resume, but whether your scope, judgment, and impact have expanded.
Are you solving harder problems? Are you making decisions rather than just implementing them? Do you understand the business as well as the technology? And are you keeping pace with where the ecosystem is heading? If yes, then you’re likely on the right path – regardless of what your resume says.
