After passing the salesforce administrator (adm-201) certification exam you have proved that you have a very good knowledge of working with and customizing Salesforce. As a certified system administrator, you will have shown that you can configure the CRM-platform and know about the many options you can set to get the most out of Salesforce - for your customers or your company.
The Salesforce admin certification also allows you better jobs and career opportunities because many fortune companies are using Salesforce. This makes you a valuable resource for these kinds of companies.
This section covers administration essentials for new admins. With 20% it is one of the largest parts of the certification exam. In a real exam, there can be questions on topics that can be found in the company settings. These include, for example, the settings for fiscal years, business hours, multi-currency, or default settings.
You also have to prove that you understand the administration and configuration of the user interface. Therefore, you may be asked multiple-choice questions about general user interface settings, the app menu, list views, and global actions. The appropriate user setup and maintenance are also included.
Topics like security control settings (audit trail, login hours, sessions), sharing settings (organization-wide default, roles, role hierarchy, public/private reports and dashboards) but also profile settings, and permission sets are part of it.
A fifth of the salesforce administrator certification exam are questions around Object manager and lightning app builder. As a Salesforce Admin, you will be working a lot with the object manager and this may include basic questions about the standard objects, their architecture, and relationships.
You will not be able to avoid parent/child, master-detail relationships, lookups, junction objects, and record types. Working with fields belongs to the certification as well. That means how to create, modify, and delete them as well as the conditions and consequences. A big section is about the page layout and how to customize standard and custom objects. You must know how to assign these page layouts and what you can do with record types.
Process Automation tools offered by Salesforce have the third largest weighting. These include flows, process builders, approval processes and workflows. However, it can be assumed that workflows will no longer play a role in this section of the adm-201 exam in the future, as Salesforce wants to abolish them.
It is therefore very likely that the focus will shift towards flows in the future. The exam questions will mainly be use cases, where a specific scenario is described and you have to decide which of the automation tools best fulfills the described conditions.
Thereby you prove that you have knowledge about the respective workflow/automation tools and decide on the right ones based on their capabilities. But for that, you have to know how to set them up and what you can adjust.
In terms of data management and analytics, it's mainly about the import and export capabilities of Salesforce, data quality and how to get the most out of existing data. More specifically, one area to consider is when you are importing, updating, transferring, deleting on a large scale, exporting or backing up data.
This is mainly about the Data Import Wizard and the Data Loader, so you should know, how and for what you use which tool. For the data quality the validation rules are an important feature of Salesforce. That's why you need to know the possibilities and implications for the adm-201 exam.
In terms of data analytics, reports and dashboards are important tools. Do you know the available options when creating or customizing a report or report type? Related to this are also the sharing models of reports. The expectation can reach from exam questions on dashboards until creating and modifying them. In this context you will have to understand the terms dashboard components, data sources, charts, subscribe and running user.
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The next part of the certification exam is about sales and marketing application, which are included in the sales cloud license. To get all the points you need to know how to use the Salesforce features in the best way to increase sales productivity. This includes sales process, opportunities, dashboards and einstein opportunity scoring.
The capabilities of lead automation tools and campaign management won’t be neglected. You should be familiar with the objects Lead and Campaigns and how to convert leads, assign leads, lead scoring and how to manage campaign members.
With the service cloud license you have access to the service and support applications. In this context you have to answer questions about the capabilities of case management and how to automate it with case assignment rules, queues, escalation rules and auto-response rules.
The last part of the adm-201 exam with 7% is about the features offered by Salesforce. Such features are activity management, mobile administration and especially Chatter, which probably is the most important tool when it comes to productivity and collaboration. Salesforce also offers extensions that can be integrated via Appexchange, about which you can expect some exam questions.
Registering for the real exam costs $200 (tax included), and you can choose to take it at a testing center or online. Then the exam language is English and consists of 60 multiple choice questions, for which you have 105 minutes. If English is not your native language, you can request 30 extra minutes.
According to our experience, you will not have any problems with the time. To pass the actual exam you need 65% correct, which is the equivalent of at least 39 correct questions. The tricky part is that there are questions with multiple correct answers. They are only counted as correct if you have selected all the correct solutions.
If you fail the salesforce certified administrator exam in the first attempt, you can do retake the salesforce certification exam for 50% of the $200 you paid to take the exam for the first time.
If you think it's easier to write the exam online because you can just google the questions during the exam or browse a pdf with theory content on a second monitor, you're wrong! For online exam preparation you need to download software that records your computer activity during the exam, but also via the camera and microphone your movements and sounds.
This software is a condition to be able to write the real exam at all. Especially if it is your first time taking an exam under such conditions, it can cause stress. But if you prepare well and take the following exam preparation tips to heart, then you don't need to cheat.
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There are many ways to prepare for the actual exam and some are more effective for one person and for someone else they are more of a waste of time. Therefore, we spoke with many Salesforce administrator certification holders and they all told us different ways of exam preparation. In the following we will list our top 3 and share our opinion about them:
In our opinion, the most effective way to prepare for salesforce administrator certification exam, even if there are costs involved. Focus on Force offers two options: the study guide for 19€ and 6 practice exams for 19€. With the study guide you get a lot of study material like explanatory videos and slides that cover each relevant topic in detail.
You don't have to learn everything in detail, it should be enough to watch the videos on the individual topics to get an overview of the diversity of Salesforce. Relevant areas in the system are also shown directly. In addition, there are the so-called topic exams. For each area of the exam there is at least one topic exam with 30 to over 60 questions, which are asked in the format of exam questions.
After answering each practice question you will see an explanation of the questions and answers why the given answer is wrong or right and usually also a screenshot how it looks like in Salesforce or where you can find it there. After answering a question in a test environment (if available) or in the Trailhead Playground, we recommend that you follow the steps shown.
This will help you not only in preparation for the exam but also for the administration in Salesforce. In addition, focus on force also offers practice exams, which we think you can save 19€ on, because the questions are 1:1 the same as in the topic exams. However, in the real exam, the questions are not asked in topic blocks, but can appear in different places. Therefore, this 19€ can also be worthwhile for one or the other.
Practice makes perfect, and this also applies to passing the adm-201 exam. Practice exams will give you a feeling of how the exam questions are structured and you will notice that some of them will be very similar to the questions in the real exam. Many people worry beforehand that they will have time problems.
But from our experience, time will not be a problem, you will see that if you write a practice exam at least once and time it. With these you get an insight if you would pass the exam or how much is still missing to pass it. There are several ways to do practice exams, some are free and for others you have to pay (or share with colleagues). In preparation we took practice exams from:
This trail mix will take about 68.5h. In it, there are various trails on all the topics for which there can be exam questions. These are also sorted by the topic blocks. Trailhead is always a good way to get an overview in a Salesforce Org and click through the various functionalities by yourself. This can be very helpful for the real exam, however with Trailhead always comes a problem: to complete the trail only 1-3 possibilities are ever tested.
This means that at some point you only read through the theory with the focus on solving the task. In the process, you don't really remember the other scenarios and possibilities on the topic. Since the exam questions are very rarely similar to the tasks in Trailhead it can probably happen that after successfully completing the trail mix you will not be able to achieve the passing score of 65% (when the exam preparation consists only of Trailhead).
But in order to deepen one's knowledge in a certain topic area for adm-201 it is a very good possibility if one goes openly through the theory and does not only concentrate on answering the trailhead questions. It is also very useful as a supplement or in combination with focus on force, for example, to display the configuration options in Salesforce in the Playground.
Especially if you combine it with the practice exams you can take a look after every test question within salesforce and check it. In the end you have to find a way that fits your way of learning the best. But one thing is necessary in our opinion: practice tests.
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