Friday 28 November 2014

London Salesforce Developers - Certified Technical Architect Panel

Certified Technical Architect Panel

The November meetup of the London Salesforce Developers had a different format to usual, when a panel of Salesforce Certified Technical Architects convened to answer questions from the community about the Technical Architect certification process.

The meetup was hosted at Cloud Sherpas and MC’d by Francis Pindar, with most of the organisation coming (as usual) from Anup Jahdav.  The panel consisted of 6 CTAs - Luke Emberton, Wes Nolte, Andy Mahood, Seb Wagner, Francesco Iervolino and myself - Keir Bowden.

Ta1

Appearing at these events always requires a balancing act as the review board is subject to NDAs both from a candidate and judge perspective, so we aren’t able to go into any details of the board and have to make sure that we talk at a level that is useful but protects the certification - having worked so hard to achieve the credential the last thing any of us want is to devalue it.

We weren’t entirely sure how much interest there would be in an event of this nature, given that TA is the highest level of certification and not necessarily something everyone would have in their career plan.  As it turned out, this event had one of the best turnouts I can remember, as this shot from the back of the room shows.

Ta2

The key points from the panel with regard to preparation for the board were:

  • Identify the key areas from the study guide and try to get yourself on projects that have requirements of this nature - e.g. integration, complex security and sharing, single sign on
  • Its an intense experience to remember to take a step back and breathe from time to time
  • This isn’t something that you can prepare for simply by studying - you need real world experience
  • Pre-sales work is useful preparation for being peppered with questions on a solution you have just thought of!

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