What Skills Transfer Well Into a Salesforce Admin Career?
Description
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about how he got into the ecosystem and what skills transfer well into a Salesforce Admin career.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.
Transitioning into a Salesforce Admin career
You might recognize David from his Dreamforce presentation about resolving Flow errors, or our episode about it on the podcast. However, one thing that came up was his career pivot from finance to being a Salesforce Admin, and I wanted to bring him back to talk more about it.
To make a long story short, David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. That job involves a lot of reporting and, somewhere along the way, he realized that running the reports was the most exciting part of the job for him.
David decided to make a career change and focus on Salesforce. But that meant he needed to go on the hunt and figure out how to land his first full-time Salesforce role.
What to look for in job descriptions
David’s comfort with data, spreadsheets, and reconciliation gave him a strong analytical foundation for making the shift. These skills made it easier to understand how reporting, data cleanliness, and business processes translated to what admins build on the platform.
However, having the right skills is only part of the story—he still needed to find the right jobs to apply to. “It’s not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things,” David says, “but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work.”
In general, David’s advice is to narrow things down for yourself. Look for organizations that are already committed to Salesforce, and job postings that are looking for the admin skillset instead of somebody who can do it all.
A problem-solving mindset and curiosity fuel the admin journey
For David, the skill that transfers best into a Salesforce Admin career is curiosity. When he was starting out, he was only interested in learning things that would be immediately applicable to the task at hand.
Looking back on it now, David realizes he could have learned much faster if he had indulged his curiosity. “I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt,” he says, “and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things.”
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from David about how he transferred his skills into a Salesforce Admin career. And make sure you’re subscribed to the show to catch us every Thursday.
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Learn more
- Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin
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Full show transcript
Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, what if spreadsheet skills from your last job could be the secret to launching your Salesforce admin career? In this episode, we welcome back David Simpson, who shares his story from accounting to automation and how his finance background paved the way to becoming a certified Salesforce admin. We dive into the skills that transferred surprisingly well, the learning curves that came with the role, and the mindset shift that helps him grow. So whether you’re thinking about making a career move or just mentoring somebody who is, this conversation’s packed with insights. So with that, let’s get David on the podcast.
David Simpson:
Thank you for having me back.
Mike Gerholdt:
It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you’re giving at Dreamforce, and we’ve since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn’t blame you. There’s a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven’t talked about careers a whole lot, but let’s just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I’ve watched a lot of streaming things. Let’s fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin.
David Simpson:
Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins.
Mike Gerholdt:
Exactly.
David Simpson:
So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company’s Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean.
So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn’t too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data.
So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it’s all history. I went and unfortu
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