Cloudstock London 2012

In an unexpected turn of events, I'm going to be presenting a community session at Cloudstock London 2012.  Unexpected as I hadn't planned on this, but a slot came open at the last minute and I agreed to fill in.

The upside to this is that I didn't have much time to think about what I was committing to.  The downside was that I had to decide on my topic and produce a description in a few hours.  What to speak about then?   It had to be something I was familiar with that wouldn't take a huge amount of time to prepare, as Cloudstock was just over a week away.  Looking at the list of existing community sessions, there was a theme of deep dives into specific technical areas - @wesnolte on Javascript Remoting and MVC Frameworks for example, or @pbatisson on Advanced Force.com Testing Techniques.

It struck me that there was an opportunity here to reach those attendees with little or no experience of Force.com, or those with some experience looking to progress.  There was already a breakout session introducing the Force.com platform, so there was little point in a session with the same technical angle.  Therefore I decided to look at this from a different perspective, and cover starting out as a Force.com developer, what employers are looking for and career progression.

This seemed like a good starting point, but unlikely to fill a 30 minute session unless I spoke very slowly! As followers of this blog know, if there's one thing I'm pretty familiar with that's Salesforce.com Certification. Most Salesforce/Force.com careers will involve gaining certifications - its certainly a key metric for Cloud Alliance Partners - so I'll be talking about the benefits, what the exams involve and how to prepare.  Since I gained the Technical Architect accreditation I've had a lot of interest in the exam, particularly the Review Board, so I'll be covering that too and expecting questions!

So if you are thinking about a job in Force.com development, or looking to gain recognition and advance your career through Certification, join me at Cloudstock from 12:30 to 1pm to find out more.