Unless you’re a business owner or Salesforce employee, you may not be familiar with what Salesforce does. If you are a business owner, you know how valuable its sales, service, marketing, analytics and mobile app services can be. If you’re an employee, you’re working for one of Fortune Magazine’s "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2021 (it’s number two on the list).
If you aren’t an employee, you could be. Just keep reading.
Salesforce estimates that 87% of Fortune 500 companies use its products in some way. This, the company says, creates three million jobs in the “Salesforce ecosystem,” with a total of 4.2 million by 2024. All veterans and spouses have to do to be a part of it is earn their Salesforce certification.
It all begins with registering for the company’s Trailhead military training program. It’s a free, self-paced online learning platform that can be accomplished at any time. Many, including fully employed veterans and current members of the armed forces, finish the training program in four months -- but if it takes longer, that’s OK.
Once in training, vets become known as “Trailblazers,” on their way to certification. No prior education or experience is required. Trailblazers are then put on a curated certification path, earning vouchers as they learn. These vouchers are redeemable for Salesforce classes and certification examinations.
After completing certifications along their new career path, they can fill one of any number of cloud-computing roles inside Salesforce or with one of the hundreds of companies that utilize Salesforce technology or products. These include Salesforce developers, designers, architects, sales, marketing, data analytics and more.
For anyone unsure of which path to take, Salesforce has that covered, too. Just visit the company’s handy career path guide to start learning more about the jobs, their pay, the benefits most often included in these roles and the soft skills recruiters look for when hiring those jobs.
Read: Veterans Bring Exceptional Skills, Including Soft Skills
For military members, completing the Salesforce certification program makes them eligible for the Hiring Our Heroes Salesforce Fellowship Program, a 12-week virtual internship with a Salesforce partner.
That’s not just good resume fodder; that’s a chance to smooth the service member’s transition into civilian life with a job at a Salesforce partner company. The internship has a 87% job offer rate and an average starting salary of $87,000 for graduates. In the pilot year alone, 60 veterans and spouses were selected for the program.
For everyone who completes the training, veteran, guard or reserve and spouses alike, the program is a pipeline and offers the chance to interview with one of the Salesforce corporate partners. This means that a veteran who completes the program in four months conceivably could work for Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers or even Salesforce itself just six months from getting started.
Best of all, the average salary for an employee with their newly acquired Salesforce skills is around $70,000, well above the median annual income in the United States. It also can lead to further upskilling training with one of the corporate partners.
To learn more about the Salesforce Trailhead Military training program, visit the program website. To get started right away, just go to the registration page and register with your TroopID. This will register you for the program while verifying your veteran status. You also can check out the list of Salesforce’s corporate partners.
-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.
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