As the Salesforce ecosystem continues to expand, the skillsets required for career advancement are also evolving. In recent years, the job market has experienced a swift transformation – from a period of rapid ecosystem growth, where companies competed fiercely for talent, to a more saturated landscape in certain skill areas.
This is why in 2025 and beyond, it’s vital to pay attention to the market, its demands, and how you can seek to acquire the skillsets that companies want to hire. Both an advantage and disadvantage of the technology landscape is that nothing stays the same for long…
What Is a Salesforce Niche?
In order for you to stay competitive as a Salesforce professional, you must seek to focus on the roles, skills, and products that are in demand. In a pre-2022 world, basic Sales Cloud and Service Cloud skills were highly sought-after. However, as the job market has shifted, these skills are almost becoming commoditized, with the number of professionals familiar with these products now outstripping the available jobs due to reduced demand.
A Salesforce niche could encompass a variety of specialties. It could be a role such as a developer, expertise in a certain industry such as healthcare, a product such as Commerce Cloud, a feature such as Flow, or a discipline such as business analysis.
Wherever you seek to grow your career in the future, it’s important to ensure you stay valuable to employers by focusing on the specialties that few professionals can do.
In previous years’ articles, we have focused mostly on Salesforce Products as niches. But for 2025, I want to bring in features and disciplines backed up with data from our research division at SF Ben.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
- Firstly, Salesforce’s growth is slowing down across most products they are selling. Although skills such as Mulesoft and Marketing Cloud are undoubtedly going to be more in demand than Sales Cloud, there are fewer transformational projects around than there were a few years ago, and potentially better areas to focus on as a professional.
- Secondly, if you are currently working as an admin in Sales Cloud, moving to a career in Marketing Cloud is going to be difficult. The skills and knowledge needed to make this jump are vast, and your career will take an entirely different direction.
So let’s dive into the top 13 niches for 2025…
Salesforce Niches for 2025
1. Technical Debt
In the world of 2024, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Salesforce is getting vastly more complicated. This is a natural evolution over a decade of innovation and platform changes, as well as increasing levels of technical debt building up.
27% of Salesforce Developers from our recent survey agreed that the biggest challenge with Salesforce is working on top of technical debt. It’s probably not an overarching statement to say that all Salesforce orgs will struggle with some level of technical debt.
Therefore, professionals who understand best practices, DevOps, business analysis, change management, and other skills that come with dealing with technical debt, will be very busy for years to come.
2. Data Cloud
Data Cloud has been central to Salesforce’s strategy for two years now and is becoming increasingly more relevant in the age of AI, combining unstructured data from across the business into a usable format. Last quarter, the number of Data Cloud customers grew 130% YoY, and Salesforce has stated it will probably be the fastest product to $1B in revenue.
Although Data Cloud is a relatively new product and is being adopted by many Salesforce customers, only 10% of professionals from our recent survey have experience with it.
3. Lightning Web Components
Although Lightning Web Components is an older product that is a core part of building user experiences on the Lightning platform, it’s the skill that most Salesforce Developers feel least confident in.
Although the Salesforce platform has primarily been built around a low code/no code methodology with tools such as Flow, Developers are very much in demand and can command higher salaries than Admins.
4. DevOps
Salesforce DevOps took the ecosystem by storm a few months ago, and it was interesting to see in our Developer Survey that it’s well adopted – over 70% of respondents use some kind of DevOps tool, whether it be a custom setup, AppExchange product, or the DevOps Centre.
However, a surprisingly low number of professionals are proficient in core DevOps features such as Git, with only a quarter of professionals knowing it well.
The role of DevOps Engineer was also, surprisingly, the highest-paid job in our latest SF Ben salary survey, coming in at an average of $192,000, with salaries going up to $275,000.
5. Flow
Flow may seem like a weird choice to put on a niche list, considering it’s the most common automation tool used by the ecosystem. However, there is a difference between building simple flows and building complex automation and visual screen flows that power sophisticated business processes.
Flow is becoming very powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility, And there are concerns from experienced professionals that without proper governance and control, they may do more harm than good.
For those who can build powerful, scalable flows that adhere to architectural best practices, you will be more in demand than ever.
It’s also important to note that Developers are using flows more than ever before to accomplish some simpler tasks, and are now a core part of powering the Agentforce product suite.
6. Einstein 1 Studio
This brings us perfectly to the first AI section. The Einstein 1 Studio consists of Prompt Builder, Agent Builder, and Model Builder – three tools designed to build the foundations for your AI experience in Salesforce.
Although Agentforce has just been released, the Einstein 1 Studio released last year, still contains the fundamental experience to build autonomous agents. These tools and components within the Einstein 1 Studio should not be forgotten.
7. Agents
Dreamforce 2024 was all about autonomous agents, with Marc Benioff describing it as “what AI was meant to be.”
Salesforce has released a new set of tools on top of their existing AI tools that allow you to build autonomous agents, primarily in the sales and customer service space initially.
If you believe the hype, agents are the next big thing in the world of tech, and their clicks not code Agent Builder contains various new features and components such as topics and the Atlas Reasoning Engine that professionals can get stuck into.
8. Data and Integrations
Another fundamental skill that nearly a fifth of Salesforce Developers feel least confident in is integration with other platforms. The term “Data is the new oil” was coined back in 2006, and in the age of large language models and AI, it couldn’t be more true.
Companies will be racing to ensure their data strategy is top-notch, systems should be integrated, and Data Cloud will be utilized, all to ensure the new wave of artificial intelligence can easily access everything about your business, and its customers.
9. Slack
It’s easy to forget that Slack is one of Salesforce’s leading products, but it was their biggest acquisition ever, and Salesforce wants to ensure they get ROI out of their $27.7B purchase.
This is why they have put the Salesforce co-founder and CTO, Parker Harris, on the case. Salesforce has released several exciting announcements at Dreamforce 2024 such as Salesforce Channels (Lightning pages inside of Slack), as well as third-party agents living inside of Slack.
Slack’s capabilities are being slowly built out to be very comprehensive, and with companies’ reliance on business messaging tools, it’s a good product to get behind.
10. Business Analysis
Whilst AI may be coming for the jobs of junior developers there may be some safe roles (for now). Business analysts will always remain a vital part of the SDLC – get it wrong, and your project is doomed. This is why a fifth of developers chose “Gathering the right requirements” as one of the most challenging things to get right in Salesforce.
As Robert Sösemann puts it “The complexity of the software business does not lie in coding. It’s about humans, wrong assumptions, communication effectiveness, etc.”
No matter your role in Salesforce, you can become more valuable by upping your BA skills. Why not take the Salesforce certification?
11. Large Language Models
Although LLMs are fairly “off-piste” for a Salesforce professional to lean into, this is going to be a gap in knowledge for most organizations at the moment. Salesforce is placing itself at the center of the AI revolution. When using tools like Model Builder, you will be required to choose the relevant LLM to integrate into an action.
Although Salesforce professionals won’t be tasked with developing and maintaining LLMs, understanding how they work and how they can improve specific functions can only help your CV in the future.
12. General AI Knowledge
Tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and countless other AI tools are coming onto the market and being utilized by more professionals every week. AI is also developing at such a rate, that it will be integrated into most business processes in a few years.
Understanding how the AI landscape is developing, as well as how you can use it to perform your job better will be vital in the world of tomorrow. Stay abreast of updates, trial tools, and understand the business benefits of using or implementing them.
13. Architecture
With Salesforce becoming more complex and AI accelerating platform development, architecture is more relevant than ever. A quarter of Salesforce Developers now cite platform limitations and challenges as the biggest issue when working with Salesforce.
Architecture is all about best practices, asking questions, and developing solutions that are scalable. No matter your role in the Salesforce ecosystem, architect or not, the principles remain.
Summary
Although none of us have a crystal ball, we can follow the trends, research, and direction the Salesforce ecosystem is heading.
Although AI will be the flavor of the next few years, fundamental Salesforce concepts listed in this article won’t be going away anytime soon.
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