Career / Artificial Intelligence / Platform

What Is the Outlook for the Salesforce Job Market in 2025?

By Sasha Semjonova

The Salesforce job market is going through a big reset. Unfortunately, we are forced to bid farewell to the benefits of the pandemic tech boom, and the 2022-23 period showed us first-hand just how difficult a crash can be to swallow.

However, with every trough, there must be a peak. As we get ready to tackle 2025, are Salesforce job market conditions as gloomy as last year? 

2020-2023: The State of Salesforce 

The great job market reset theory is something that I explored in one of my recent articles and can be broken down into three segments: during the pandemic, the after-pandemic crash, and the current recovery period

During the pandemic, the tech industry experienced a considerable boost – one that Salesforce reveled in. Salesforce’s 2020 State of Salesforce Report showed positive signs of “digital acceleration”, and continued to thrive into 2022 with the announcement of a record FY22 Q4 in March.

Come 2023, and despite the announcement and release of the Einstein 1 Platform, Salesforce experienced one of its biggest dips. Large-scale layoffs took place, job market supply outweighed the demand for the first time in years, and a 9% price increase in 2023 all attributed to a mighty crash that left the ecosystem reeling. 

As we rounded up 2023, emotions were tense across the board. A lot of professionals were disheartened by the challenges they’d need to overcome to survive in the ecosystem. But has 2024 been any different?

READ MORE: The Great Salesforce Job Market Reset

Is the 2025 Salesforce Job Market Still Saturated? 

If we were to seek to answer whether the Salesforce job market was still saturated, then we’d likely all come to the conclusion that yes, it is indeed still saturated. 

Once again, findings from 10k’s 2024 Talent Ecosystem Report show that the supply of professionals grew by 19% this year, and demand from employers decreased by 37% – there are still more interested professionals than there are available positions. 

10k were quick to assure readers of the report that the situation is “not all doom and gloom” as 2023’s drop in demand sat at 46% last year compared to 37% this year. The rise in supply isn’t as stark as it previously was either, with a 19% increase compared to a 28% increase last year. 

However, the current climate remains fairly dire as the YoY drop in demand is still frustratingly large. Compare it to the disparity seen last year and it can be easy to think that things are moving forward. While this may be true, the wider context of the ecosystem and the continued gap in supply and demand means that the job market is still not healthy. 

A notable factor that has been affecting this narrative is the rise of offshoring in the ecosystem: the practice of relocating production or services to overseas locations. Allured by lower costs and potential bigger scalability prospects, employers have been leaning into offshore employment in favor of offshore. 

Of course, this is contributing to a shortage of jobs in the world’s western regions – 87% of the ecosystem admitted that they’ve felt that the market has been more challenging recently than previously, and this doesn’t come as a surprise; it now takes a quarter of professionals around three to six months to land their next role.

Lucrative or Useless? 

Of course, for many of us, the main factor behind seeking a new job is the salary! So the big question is: is a career in Salesforce worth the money anymore? 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to this lies in your experience level and position in the ecosystem. For those who have been in the ecosystem for several years, it’s still an incredibly lucrative career. If you’re a fresh-faced newbie eager to make your mark in the world of cloud greatness, then your options may not look so bright. 

When we explored this topic just before Dreamforce last year, we concluded that the “market was probably the worst it [had] ever been”. It’s safe to say that things aren’t that bad now, but we are certainly no closer to favorable levels of growth. 

Entry-level salaries still start higher than other select tech salaries (although this is country-dependent), and it’s common to see salary growth that increases well with each year. 57% of respondents from our salary survey admitted that they received some kind of additional compensation, such as an annual or performance-based bonus. 

However, a big indicator of a job’s viability lies in the compensation’s ability to keep up with inflation. This can’t happen if salaries are lower or the same as they have been for a number of years. 

In our salary survey, 46% of overall respondents stated that they felt salaries in the Salesforce ecosystem had increased. However, if you take a look at feelings on a more granular level, 37.2% of respondents from Europe and 55.6% of respondents from the Middle East felt as if salaries had stayed the same, and 57.1% of respondents from Central America said they felt as if salaries had decreased. 

This indicates that salary trends have been varying across countries and regions, which is important to keep in mind if you’re looking to enter the ecosystem this year.

READ MORE: Here Are Your Salesforce Job Trends for 2025

Health of the Market

Due to the current socioeconomic climate that is being heavily felt across the world, finances act as the main impellent when it comes to job choices. However, unlike the terse environment of 2022-2023, Salesforce have made consistent efforts to make their business more efficient – putting the job market well on the road to recovery.

Most notably, Salesforce were one of the first movers in the agent revolution. After the release of Agentforce, Google, Microsoft, and ServiceNow were close behind with their own agents, signaling a strong path forward for the industry. 

Combine this with a stellar Agentforce marketing campaign that has people talking all across the CRM and wider tech space, and it’s impossible not to notice the hype. It’s something that Ben McCarthy, founder of Salesforce Ben, says is truly undeniable amongst any uncertainty.

“Love or hate Salesforce’s marketing, Agentforce is everywhere, and everyone is talking about it.”

This is really promising for the ecosystem – Agentforce has the potential to significantly boost Salesforce’s job market, especially if it’s able to generate substantial growth and profits. If Agentforce isn’t the driving force, then it’s likely tools such as Data Cloud or the resurging Service Cloud could do its part to spearhead this growth.

It is impossible to know for sure, especially as we’re yet to see the full scope of Agentforce’s implementation metrics. But Ben believes that if neither of these scenarios ends up taking place, the ecosystem would continue to grow and “chug along slowly” with the hope of the job market prospering sometime in the future.

I’m Determined: What Do I Do? 

If you’re interested in entering the ecosystem this year, then you definitely can – but you need to manage your expectations.

The market has not replicated the pandemic boom or even pre-pandemic levels, and it’s uncertain as to if or when that will happen. This makes entering the market much more difficult than before, and moving up in the ecosystem is also harder if you can’t showcase stand-out skills. 

I’m New, What Do I Do?

The advice for new professionals and existing professionals is slightly different, but Colby Ricker, a Salesforce and CRM expert, says that junior Salesforce professionals should always seek to lead with “functional expertise”. 

He mentioned that RevOps seems to be an up-and-coming focus area right now (with investment in RevOps seemingly on the rise), so that might be a specialty that’s worth getting stuck into.

“RevOps seems to be having a minute right now,” Colby said. “I take that as a signal that companies are more interested in someone who understands a business domain than they are someone who just has skills on a technical platform.”

If RevOps isn’t for you, then there are other niches that you could begin exploring this year; it’s just a matter of finding the most applicable one (or two) for your career path.

Darrel Gallegos, a Salesforce Architect, says that he believes newcomers to the industry should view their choices and paths with a much more critical eye.

“First and foremost, I would want to know why a newcomer would attempt to enter the Salesforce ecosystem,” he said. 

“The first answer I would expect is related to potential entry income. The next answer would likely be because a peer or network affiliation talked up the career path. The most likely answer would be ‘We use it at the company I work for’. However, I would highly doubt there would be an original answer along the lines of finding a challenging opportunity to leverage a CRM platform to modernize businesses.”

He even went as far as to say that he would personally advise newcomers against joining the market at present, stating that a job in Salesforce may “seem super attractive” but that it was important for juniors to consider the implications of joining the market in 2025 – a market distinctively different from the one we saw in 2020-2021.

“Look at the trends that are impacting the current environment. Salesforce is gearing towards finding features, Agentforce 1.0 and 2.0, to assist or even act, not only for external customer services but expanding the internal use cases too.”

In this current market, it’s no longer as simple as aspiring to become a Salesforce Admin or Salesforce Developer, equipped with textbook skills and certifications. Employers will be looking for professionals who can demonstrate a keen understanding of the “skills of tomorrow”, which in Salesforce’s case is AI skills and an awareness of where they can be implemented. 

I’ve Been Here a While: What Do I Do?

For professionals who have already been in the Salesforce ecosystem for some time, it can still be daunting to contemplate how to deal with the challenges of a turbulent market. 

Colby says that for anyone worried about job security or what could be coming next in their careers, that specialization advice remains as pertinent as ever.

“Pick a lane and go deep. If you’re more comfortable on the technical side, learn AWS (or GCP or Azure, depending on your organization). Learn where those technologies might be a better option than Salesforce.

“I think we’ve moved past the time of ‘Salesforce jobs’. Salesforce is a great skill, and you can market it, but you need to be super deep in technology or business to be indispensable.”

Darrel, who has taken some time away from the ecosystem, was also able to provide a unique perspective for others who have chosen to leave Salesforce and might be curious as to whether coming back in 2025 is the right idea.

In the ski industry, his new career sector, he uses Salesforce for apps and services that would benefit his customers, keeping up with the most relevant new features and functionalities, including agents. It’s this dedication to keeping up that positions him in a more valuable position if he decides to return, as, in his words, it shows that he understands that “Salesforce is not normally the only piece in the architecture” of an offering or solution.

However, ultimately, the barrier keeping Darrel and many others back is the compensation. 

“I will return to Salesforce when the value of the architect role is recognized, and I mean monetarily,” he told me. “I do not see the point in returning to a role where I know the expectations at half the rate.”

“Currently, I see companies hiring people with “good enough” skills to keep expenses down, and that’s unfortunate because that does not ensure recognizing the value.”

Final Thoughts 

Let me make it very clear that we are not here to dissuade anyone from entering or being successful in this wonderful ecosystem. After all, why would we? Even as someone who has not been in the ecosystem for that long of a time, I have already had the pleasure of witnessing how welcoming, fruitful, and full of opportunities it is.

However, the job market has only begun its slow crawl back up to recovery, and even with the promising possibilities of AI and Agentforce, it’s still too early to say whether there will be a proper “bounce back”. 

If a career in Salesforce is for you, approach everything as realistically as possible. Understand that it will be difficult, and understand that it will take time. Every rejection email and every setback can be treated as a learning experience, but don’t be too hard on yourself if things don’t feel like they’re working out.

We will continue reporting on the status of the job market and any advancements, so watch this space!

The Author

Sasha Semjonova

Sasha is the Video Production Manager and a Salesforce Reporter at Salesforce Ben.

Leave a Reply