Architect Courses for Admins with Amit Malik

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Amit Malik, Senior Manager, Global Architect Program.

Join us as we talk about the Architect courses on Trailhead and why all Admins should think about taking them.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Amit Malik.

Why Admins are already Architecting

We wanted to bring Amit on the pod because he’s the only Architect Trailhead Instructor, and we wanted to find out more about what’s on offer and if they make sense for Admins. One thing he loves about his current role is that he can see “how Administrators, Developers, and Architects are having a similar thought process in terms of how to see Salesforce from different perspectives and how we can add value by sharing the perspective of different personas with each other and expand our mind horizons,” he says.

One message he has for Admins out there is that a lot of the work you’re doing is already giving you the context to upskill into an Architect role, or otherwise expand your knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem as a whole. If you already know Marketing Cloud, it’s a lot easier to learn Experience Cloud, for example. As Amit puts it, you can look to grow both horizontally (between products) and vertically (in terms of depth of knowledge on a platform) as you advance your career.

The three-step learning process

When you’re looking to learn something new, Amit encourages you to think about it as a three-step process:

1. Knowledge
2. Experience
3. Exposure

Knowledge comes when you read about something, watch a video about it, hear about it at a conference, etc. Experience is applying that knowledge to specific situations in a real-world setting. Finally, exposure comes from conversations with experienced people who may have gained a completely different perspective than they had when they started. It’s that three-dimensional view you get from understanding how something works in conjunction with everything else.

Architect courses on Trailhead

Amit wants you to know that Architect courses aren’t just for Architects. “We all are Salesforce professionals,” he says, “Administrators, Developers, Solution Architects, Technical Architects: we all are Salesforce professionals.” If you’re discussing integration in your meetings, or large data volume, or single sign-on—anything that involves multiple Salesforce products talking together—you have a lot to gain sitting in on an Architect course or two.

The 101 course is there to provide a broad, big-picture overview of what being an Architect is all about. As Amit puts it, the goal is to point you in the direction of what there is to learn about so you can fill in the details in whatever way is most helpful to you. “The challenge of the learner is that they don’t know where to start,” he says, “the moment that they know where to start they can keep on learning faster than I can teach them.” From there, the next level courses are more specialized, after you’ve completed some basic Architect certifications. “Join these courses to discover yourself so you can make the right decision for your career,” he says, “if you don’t know we will help you see the path because we’ve already walked through these journeys.”

 

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Social

• Amit: @amitmalikus
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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