The more information you collect about a career path, the more educated your choice will be. Choosing your career path is as much an inward-facing discovery process as it is an external, experiential one. To make the best decisions that guide you forward, you can look inward at your own unique constellation of preferences, strengths, and personality traits, as well as outward to collect details from other people who have information about the career path or paths you are considering.

In this section we will consider the different factors you can use in your internal discovery process. We will then provide detailed information about the differing career paths, including case studies from people who are working in functional, technical, consulting, and entrepreneurial careers. Finally we include review tips for entering the Salesforce ecosystem.

Ultimately, your ability to move forward in a Salesforce-related career will be determined by two skill sets: 1) Your technical skills, which are based on your training and experience (and can be showcased through project experience and certifications); and 2) your soft skills, which are the unquantifiable attributes that enable an employee to work with others, manage stress, and persist despite obstacles.

This section covers technical skills and ways to demonstrate these skills. Chapter Twelve guides you on the resources for gaining technical skills. Chapter Thirteen discusses certifications, why they are important, and what the certification process entails. Chapter Fourteen helps you proactively manage your Salesforce career.

In Part Four we cover soft skills, which are what will allow you to advance in your career. While your technical skills might be enough to help you land a job, your soft skills give you longevity and vertical mobility.

Due to the changing nature of technology, which disrupts entire industries every few years, the hard skills, abilities, and expertise that you have today will be irrelevant in a few years. Your employers know this, so more important to them than your technical skills are the soft skills you have that make you coachable.

Being coachable means that you make room to learn new skills, to improve upon your existing skills, and to grow as a person. It means you are willing to transform when transformation is necessary. It means you are able to walk away from things that are not working and embrace things that are. Whereas your hard skills determine what you can accomplish today, the degree to which you can be coached predicts your future performance.

Certain soft skills are more important for certain roles. For instance, a business analyst, who is acting as a bridge between IT and the end-user, needs empathy, communication, and conflict management skills all day long. A technical developer, though, has less of a need for these soft skills, though agility is certainly important given that Salesforce releases updates regularly.

Yet, everyone needs to be coachable, particularly if they want to advance in their careers. Developers who want to become technical leads, for instance, might need to improve their communication and presentation skills. Their ability to grow and develop these new skills will depend upon the degree to which they are coachable.

Soft skills, then, are arguably as important as the hard skills you can gain through experience or certification. Certainly, if you plan to move up the ladder, you need soft skills beyond your technical proficiency. The good news is this: Soft skills might seem intangible, but they can be taught, and they can be learned. In this section, we take a look at the five soft skills that are necessary in certain Salesforce roles, and that will always make a person become more coachable.

The soft skills covered are:

• Chapter Fifteen: Agility

• Chapter Sixteen: Communication

• Chapter Seventeen: Conflict Resolution

• Chapter Eightteen: Feedback

• Chapter Nineteen: Self-Efficacy