Kid Jansen, who joins to talk about how to prepare for Salesforce CTA, is 20x certified, Technical Architect, PluralSight Author, and active community contributor.
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Main Points
- Kid’s self-introduction
- Kid’s video presentation – Salesforce certifications
- What are CTA prerequisites in terms of certifications?
- When shall people start to prepare for CTA when prerequisites are done?
- What are the differences between growing into architect from admin, consultant or developer?
- The difference among types of working companies: small or big; consulting, ISV or customer.
- The process and the content of the CTA exam
- Once I decided to start, what are the tools to assist me?
Links
Video Teaser on Salesforce CTA
Contact Me
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Take care, until next time :)!
Transcript
AI-generated, unedited.
[00:01] I'd like to welcome our sponsor, Form Assembly. Form Assembly's all-in-one web form platform lets you create forms for just about any use case. From contact forms to donation forms, all while taking advantage of useful features such as notifications, e-signatures, and more. Not only that, but you can also connect data to systems you already use. FormAssembly integrates with Salesforce, Podio, PayPal, and many other common solutions. You can find out how form assemblies help Salesforce customers optimize their data collection in a free ebook that we've linked in today's show notes. Whatever your data collection needs are, you can be sure that Form Assembly keeps your data secure with encryption at rest and in transit on all plans. Plus compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and more regulations. At the end of the day, form assembly helps you save time, money, and effort while getting the maximum benefit out of the data you collect. And I'd remind you, when you support our sponsors, you support the show. Hey everybody, this is Xi Xiao.
[01:31] This is yet a new Salesforce Way podcast episode. Today I'm sitting with a technical architect. His name's Kid Jansen. Hello, Kid. Hi, good evening. Yeah, welcome to the show. So, would you like to introduce yourself before we start? Yeah, of course. Yeah, so I'm Kid Jansen. I've been working with Salesforce for about four years now, and I currently work as a technical architect at Cap Gemini in Utrecht. And before that, I worked for two different smaller partners. I initially started out on a skilled service desk. As a bit of an admin role, and from there I moved up to technical consultants, and from there on to technical architects. I'm 18 times certified, and I've been preparing for the CTA review board for about a year and a half now. Hmm. That's exactly the reason I invited you to talk about this topic, which is to prepare for the CTA. Yeah, yeah. Just before we jump into the topic, I still want to make a plug. It is to share your YouTube video presentation you made. Is to talk about how to prepare for Salesforce certifications, right? Yeah. You shared a lot how you did it and your own experience. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, I gave the same presentation three times: once for the Amsterdam admin user group, once for women in tech, and also last year on the. What's called again the Salesforce
[03:01] World Tour in Amsterdam, and yeah, what I basically presented is my take on doing Salesforce certification exams. Because I'm actually a university dropout, and back at university, I found that the conventional ways of studying don't really work that well for me. Just sitting behind a book or sitting in lectures all day, that doesn't really do it for me. But with Salesforce certifications, there's so much more resource out there, so much more material, and also of different kinds. So we have still have the classroom courses, which are similar to a lecture, of course. But then you also have video courses, you have interactive courses. There's Trailhead, which is a great resource, and then you also have the documentation of course and resources that you still have to read. But by combining those, it can be. You can tailor it much more to your style, the way you study. So, not just one way to do it. There's many ways to do it, and you can all do it at your own speed. So, I've had months at a time where I didn't do anything in terms of certifications or studying for exams. And then I have periods where, in a very short period of time, only a few months, I did five, six, seven certifications. Sometimes even more than one in one weekend. But you can you can really do it at your own speed, whichever way you like it, and that makes a bit big difference for
[04:31] me. And that's what I wanted to share in those presentations to make sure that everyone knows that you don't have to study in the conventional way. You can do it at your own speed and in your own way. That's cool. That's the reason I will put this video link to our show notes just for our listeners to check. And our topic is for the CTA exam, which is a little bit different from the regular Salesforce certifications, right? Yeah, definitely. You mentioned you are eighteen certified, and now you are preparing for the CTA exams. Am I right? Yeah, that's correct. How can you be eligible to take the CTA exams? What are the prerequisites? So there are two pillars in the architect pyramid. So I think the pyramid is quite well known. And at the top, of course, you have the CTA review board exam. But to be eligible for the review board, you need two other certifications, and those are Application Architects and System Architects. But in order to get those, you don't have an exam for these certifications themselves, but rather you pass them by passing a few other certifications. So for the Application Architect pyramid pillar, you have Data Architecture. Sharing architecture and Platform Developer One as the required components. There's also a few optional ones: one for B2C architects
[06:02] and one for community clouds. And then on the other side, the system architecture. And there you have the development lifecycle and deployment designer. You have identity and access management designer and integration architecture, and also platform developer one. So platform developer one is shared by both sides of the of the pyramid. And once you have passed all those required designer exams plus the platform developer one, then you have system architect and application architects, and that makes you eligible for the review board. But I wouldn't say it prepares you for the review board quite yet. It's it's a good start. It's a knowledge end, but there the preparation really starts to. Yeah, get your mind ready for the the whole review board process. So that's like a marathon. You get at the starting line, but there's a long preparation, yeah, time and effort that you need to do. Okay, yeah. Um, I know a lot of people around me that they have finished like eighteen or even twenty certificates, but they haven't really have the mindset to start preparing for the CTAs either because they think it's a lot of effort, or they just don't have the. Courage, let's say, to start doing that. So, could you share a bit your experience? When should I start preparing for for it? Even if I have already have all the
[07:32] certifications prerequisites finished, yeah, I'd say right after. So, if you already have all the prerequisites, then I would say start preparing for the review board. But don't think that it's a one or two month preparation. It's takes quite a bit of experience, but not only that, you really need to prepare for the review board itself as well, and that's the toughest parts. I'd say are the. The thinking speed. It's a very short period of time to come
[08:05] up with your solution and to present it, and that's the that's actually the most difficult part. And the other one is the offline part. So, of course, you have a lot of readily available knowledge when you've been working as an architect for a few years with Salesforce, but. Even I look up quite a few things in my day-to-day work to see how was it again, just for quick confirmation. But review board is completely offline, so you you don't have any resource available. It's all top of your head, top of mind's knowledge. And that makes a big difference. Use the network. No, nothing at all. Google. You can't Google anything, so. So you're locked in the room. You're locked in. Yeah, and you have to. Everything that you have is top of mind. You can't look up anything, and that makes a big difference because the devil's in the details, of course. And sometimes a very minor thing can make a big difference. And if you if you have that detail wrong from top of mind, you cannot verify it. You cannot check it. Then your whole solution, yeah, might change, might fail. So that's that makes it much more difficult than your day to day work as an architect to come up with a solution. Of course, of course. With the normal certification exams, you also don't have any resource available to check anything. But those are a lot smaller. There's
[09:36] a lot fewer topics you have to know things about.
[09:41] Okay, but how about people's background? The students who are going to the CDAs, for example, I'm a a programmer. I might have more experience in coding part. And you, from the admin role, you grow up from the admin role. You might know more the declarative and automation tools. So for these two type of people, even other consultants, are we preparing from the different angles and more focus on different things? I say the easiest way to prepare is from the consultant's direction. From what I've heard from the CTAs that I've spoken to, I've also also been to the CTA six hundred one course last year in July. And what I've seen is that the review board is quite business centric. It's requirements driven, business driven. So the name might be certified technical architects, but to be honest, it's not that technical. The business is the focus, and you have to relate every solution to the requirements and make sure that the requirements are solved. So it's not about What you think is the best solution, based on experience, for a particular customer? It's solving the requirements that they have. So you have to make sure that you solve the requirements, and that's really a consultancy skill. I see it's it's a bit of change management
[11:11] in there. It's solution design on a functional level. So there's quite a bit of system agnostic parts in there as well. There's the whole governance and project methodologies, such as Scrum, Safe, Nexus, DID, less. So there's, and of course, there's still the waterfall, which you don't see that often. But you also have know about those topics, and those are typically what you see in a consulting role. And for admins, they might get more exposure to the the setup to the declarative automation tools. And as a developer, you have of course much more exposure. To the coding parts of Salesforce, whether it be Apex or Lightning Web Components, or still the older Aura components, or even Visual Force, and maybe a Roku as well. But it's the consulting side that it's easiest to grow from towards architects, and you still have to know about the data automation, of course, about the admin stuff, and about all the coding stuff from the developer role. But I'd say that the depth of level of knowledge you need in those areas is easier to learn as a consultant than to learn the consulting skills required as an admin or developer. Okay, this is a a new information for me. I've never heard this before. Okay, thanks
[12:41] for sharing. Yeah, you are welcome. How about people from different size of companies? They are small, medium, large corporations. You know, working in those companies, and also different type of companies, right? Like you mentioned, a consulting company or ISV company who just create the managed packages, or even in the customer who are using the orgs. So. Do you see different things from from those those angles? Yeah, definitely. It's also one of the reasons why I switched recently to Capgemini, because I started out at a small partner, only about 20 employees. Then afterwards, another smaller consulting partner, also around 20-25 people, and now recently switched to Capgemini. The small partners are great for breath, for developing your skills in a lot of different areas. So you get the admin skills, the consulting skills, the development skills, architecture, because there's. Not that much role separation. There is often just two or three people, or sometimes even one, on a project. So it's not like you have a separate project manager or or scrum master or whatever, and separate developer, separate architect, separate consultants. It's all bundled in one or two, or maybe three people. So you have to possess all those skills basically and develop in all those areas. So that's great to get a get a starting
[14:11] point on all those things. But in the end, you won't see the level of architecture in many cases required to prepare yourself for technical architects. For that, you really need the the larger projects that you, in most cases, only see with the much larger consulting partners. So for me, it was a good start to a good way to prepare to start at a small company and then move to a bigger one. Because if you start out in a much larger one like IBM and I, then you might run into the problem that you only develop in one area and don't get enough exposure to the other ones. Because if you start as a consultant or developer there. That you will only do consultancy or only development in most cases. So, it's it's the mix that works at least for me, but that might be different for others. Yeah, because in the past I talked with Gitanjia Char and Stephen Herod, and so they are sharing the same kind of knowledge and. Experience to me is that when they worked in Excentral or worked in the Blue Wharf. So they have really large size customers globally. That makes them having the unique hands-on experience to design really large-scale applications for millions and millions of customers. So I think they also mentioned that those things are really
[15:41] unique, and you only get the chance to touch those large projects in the big firms. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I see too. But you also see CTA's a lot of at Salesforce. Actually, most CTA's are at Salesforce, and also obtained their certificates at Salesforce. Then, of course, you have the large consulting partners. A few at the smaller partners and at ISV partners, and there is also CTAs at customers, where someone obtained a CTA certificate and then customer. Okay, so so all are possible. But I think it's not that much about the organization you are in, but more about the kind of implementation you are doing, the project you are running. So if you if you have the project requirements at a end customer and you're an internal architect there, then it would still work. Okay. I heard a lot of times you mentioned the review board for the CTA, but I still don't get the full process and the content of the exam. Could you just brief me what those things are? Yeah, yeah. So we discussed the the pyramid, where you become eligible with system architects and application architects, and after that you have a few interviews with Salesforce to determine if you're ready. And once they give you the go and give you a review board date, then you go for the review board, and the review board
[17:12] is have a working day, so it's either the morning or the afternoon. And in those four hours, you get two hours of preparation, and in those two hours, you read through the scenario, which is around around ten pages, something like that. It's pretty much like an RFP, and it gives you all the requirements that the customer. Wants to have solved and some some context also about the business and how they they run their business and based on that you have to design your solution in those two hours, but also come up with a way to present it. So you have to have your own format of how to prepare and how to present your solution, and you have to do it in those two hours. Take a ten-minute break, and during the break time, the proctor will hang up all your presentation material in the room because you get a flip-over chart, and you do have an offline laptop with Word, Excel, and PowerPoints, so you could make a PowerPoint presentation. But yeah, we've all done that before, of course, millions of times. Screen PowerPoint presentations, and you should probably know as well that it can take a lot of time just just to create a PowerPoint, and you don't have that time. All the time goes into making the solution and coming up with how to solve the requirements. So you really don't
[18:42] have the time to make a fancy PowerPoint. In many cases, you see that all the material used for presenting is hand drawn on the on the flip chart. So, in the ten-minute break, the proctor hangs up all your presentation material, and they have a forty-five-minute presentation. Which, from what I've been told by the CTA's who've done it, is really a monologue. You have three CTA's being the judges, and they just stare at you blankly, poker face, and you get no response from them whatsoever. So it's a forty-five minute monologue of you presenting your solution, but you have to keep track of the. You do have a clock. To keep track of the time, but the time management and the topics you cover is really on you. So the ideas that you really do need to fill that time because it's it's bad if you don't use all the time because there's always plenty to to talk about, and you really have to make sure that you cover all the topics that are required because the judges can decide for themselves in the Q and A part what they're going to ask you about, and if. If you haven't adequately covered one of the topics that you should cover in your presentation, a judge just decides for. Whatever reason, not to ask you about it, then you failed that topic, and then you automatically fail the exam, and then you have another ten minutes break after your
[20:12] presentation, and then there's forty minutes of Q and A, and the Q and A, the judges will focus mostly on your solution, but they can also ask you questions about architecture in general to get a good idea of your of your knowledge. So, from what the CTA's have told me, the Presentation is really on you. They won't help you whatsoever because it's it's a monologue, no response from them, and then in the Q and A part, they really try to help you by.
[20:46] Yeah, pushing you in a direction to to to make you realize you've made a mistake, but without leading questioning, it will always be open questions. But if you get multiple questions on the same topic, you should realize I've probably made a mistake somewhere, and I need to fix it. So they do need to they do try to push you.
[21:09] Yeah, towards realizing that you need to fix something. And important is in the whole review board process. It's always about taking things into consideration because you have to make assumptions. It's not that the scenario you get the RFP like document is full. There's always things missing that you do need for your. For your solution, so you have to make assumptions on what the customer most likely wants based on their on your experience, and then you have to present those assumptions as well, and use them in your solutioning. And you you take them into account in your answering, but it's always one option you go for. So you say, for instance, based on assumption A and requirement B, I give you this solution. But if the assumption changes, then it might be this or that solution. But you always go for one solution. It's not like well, A would work, but B would also work, so you can pick either. You always have to make a decision for one solution, and that's the one you go for, and that's the one you're judged on. But you do need to present the considerations. Like, if it's this, then you should go over here for this solution. But if it's that, you should go for that solution. This is a heavy process. Yeah, I mean, even listening to you just mentioned, it's already heavy, not to say going to the review
[22:39] board. So let me just quickly recap to make sure I get the information. And also for our listeners, is that at the beginning you are presented with the IFP kind of documentation, yeah. Page content. Then you're locked into a room for two hours. You in that room, you don't have any network access. You don't get any help. You just have your pen and paper to to write down maybe draft your design based on the information and your assumptions. Yeah, yeah, and the offline laptop, of course. Okay. Yeah, and then you have forty to forty-five minutes for the presentation in whatever way you want to do. Right. Forty-five. Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes. Yeah. And then the the CTAs who already get the CTA certificates, they are they are to listening to your presentation. They don't give you feedback or something. Yeah. Yeah. They the three judges are all CTA. But it's not like every CTA can be a judge. There's a separate process to become a judge for CTA. Oh, okay, I see, I see. Okay, and then after that, you have a short break, and then you get the Q and A. They will give you questions. But after the Q and A, are you allowed to review and adjust your design based on the feedback? No, the the changes in your design are during during your presentation and during the Q and A. So if just during your presentation you already realize yourself, oh I've made a mistake or I've missed something,
[24:10] you can edit you can edit it in your presentation and present right away. If you find something based on the questions you've been asked during Q and A that you made a mistake, you can also fix it during the Q and A. But the exam really ends at the end of the Q and A. So after the forty minutes Q and A, it's over and you cannot make any more changes. So it's really during during the Q and A that you have to do it. And that's the time you hands off and you leave the place. Yeah. And after a couple weeks, you get the answer yes or no. Yeah. I think it's about two to three weeks, and I've heard those weeks are agonizing.
[24:49] All right, that's a long process. Okay. At least they get the idea how heavy, how complicated it is. Yeah. So it's not just for a technical architect. As the name says, it has a communication. You know, you have the pressure there. You have the timing. You have to make the presentation. You need to listen to the people for the Q and A. Right. There, all sorts of skills are tested. Yeah, definitely. Okay. Yeah, it's also what makes it so difficult because the exam has been around for, I think around eleven years, twelve years or something, and there's just over three hundred CTAs now globally. So that's about twenty-seven, twenty-six per year average. That gives you a rough idea. But there's thousands of people who've tried it, so the passing rate is really low. I think they have improved it a bit by. Yeah, making the prerequisites more difficult, because when I started out with Salesforce four years ago, was just before the pyramid was introduced, and back then you only needed admin. If you have had the admin the 201 certificate, you could already go for the review board, and that's and of course the review board wasn't just the review board back then. There was one architect test before that to make sure that you were prepared for it. But if you pass, if you have admin, you could already sign up for the whole review board process. You get the
[26:19] admin exam online, which was like the the normal certification exams, and then you had the review board. But now they have now the pyramid, of course, and they've added the interviews. So you have two interviews after you lock your case to sign up for the review board. Yeah, to make sure that they they feel you are prepared, to make sure that you are not wasting your own time, not wasting the judges' time, because there are not that many slots every year, and a lot of people want to do it. Hmm. Okay. So after hearing all these stories, let's say I'm so ready to go for the CDA exams, but I need help. Right? I need to know how to study. I don't think there's a trailhead about CDA anymore. There, there is, but it's not. Oh, really? It's not in the regular trailhead. It's in the trail mixes. Okay. So for the for all designer certifications, so data architecture, sharing, integration, etc., they each have their own trail mix, and all of them are quite long. I think around forty to fifty hours, and and then there's the a full CTA trail mix. I think is well over two hundred hours, and it has the content from the designer certifications, but also a few other ones that are,
[27:50] yeah, kind of making it one thing, making it whole. So it's not just the the technical skills of of the designer certificates, but also all the other things you need to know about. But that's still the knowledge part. Still the, yeah, the things you need to know. It's not the the skills and the experience. So you also need the experience, of course, in an architect role. And then there's the the presentation. You can do. I'm not sure what other languages are. You can do CTA in. Think at least English, of course. And I think you can also do it in Japanese. Probably, probably Spanish, but I'm really not sure about all the languages you can do it in. But you have to make sure that whatever language you go for, you're absolutely fluent in that. It has to be perfect because you don't you don't want any misinterpretation. It has to be very clear to the judges what you mean. And also, for instance, articulation and volume. I know articulation can be an issue for me, especially when I'm presenting and I get a bit stressed and stuff. So you have to make sure that you're talking clearly and that they know what you're saying, especially if you're drawing on a whiteboard or something. Yeah, so that can be a challenge, and there's the at all time pressure elements combined with presenting with the complex solution. So it all comes together. It's not just one thing that's difficult and stressful. It's all of them together. So you need to work on all of them.
[29:21] And also, Kid, I understand you have created a CTA study group. Yeah, yeah, that's correct. Just after I passed my application architect and system architect about a year and a half ago, we had this this meetup with the developer user group, and it was called demystifying CTA. And we had four CTAs discussing what the review board is like, how you need to prepare when you are prepared, and they also said, well, when you have application architect and system architect, you're not prepared yet. That's where it starts really. And from there on, I found we need to do something because there's a lot of resources for the designer certificates, and. Yeah, they're quite difficult exams, but they're they're very doable if you prepare well for them. It's not that hard to pass.
[30:15] But after that, once you're application architect and system architect, it really stops. There's not that much out there to help you prepare for the review board itself. You have the knowledge part, of course, and you've covered that. But all the other things is is doing it. You can't really study for it; you really have to practice it. And for that, I found there's not nearly enough out there. So I teamed up with a few other guys from the Salesforce ecosystem here in the Netherlands. Sergei Erlik and Yorgi Saviliev, and together with them, I started this study group, the CTA study group in Lux. And we contacted basically every architect we could find that was eligible or nearly eligible for the review board, and asked them if they would be interested. In yeah, helping each other prepare by doing mock review boards, by presenting about technical topics, by discussing the issues we run into in our day to day jobs, and really to help each other raise our level of architect knowledge and help ourselves prepare for it. I mentioned the presenting back in December. We also did a presentation workshop together with the study group because the girlfriend of one of the members happens to be a presentation coach and trainer. So I did this presentation workshop to also focus on that and really on the presentation skills.
[31:46] And that's what makes it more easy because you really need people to work with who are also preparing for the same for the same goal for the for the review board to do this preparation. You can't really do it on your own. Yeah, understand. All right. We have covered a lot. We covered what the prerequisites and what are the process of the content of the CTA, and then how you are currently preparing for the CTA exams. Yeah, I see that you have spent a lot of time, and it's been a year and half passed, right? Since yeah, getting your yeah, I'm not nearly ready yet. Yeah, I think I hope to do it sometime later this year, sometime second half, but. Not sure yet. Actually, if that's, I hope it's doable. I think it's doable, but there's still a lot of preparation to do. Looking forward to that. Yeah, it's always good that you improve every day, and then at the end, no matter you get it or not, you already are far beyond where you were. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, excellent, Kid. Thanks for coming to the show and sharing this topic. Yeah, talk to you next time. Thank you. Right.
