Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Breakdown and Study Guide
While Salesforce can do a lot of things well out of the box, it’s biggest benefit is the platforms ability to let you customise your solution to perfectly match your business needs. Between customising your objects, automating processes, managing your companies internal and external data, and deploying all the changes you’ve made there can be a lot to learn. Enter the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Certificate - a way for you to validate your knowledge of the app customisation lifecycle.
Per Salesforce, “Certified Platform App Builders have the skills and knowledge to design, build, and implement custom applications using the declarative customization capabilities of the Salesforce Platform.” Further “Candidates should have experience designing, building, and implementing custom applications using the declarative customization capabilities of the Salesforce Platform.”
The exam is broken down in the following objectives:
Business Logic and Process Automation: 28%
Salesforce Fundamentals: 23%
Data Modelling and Management: 22%
User Interface: 17%
App Deployment: 10%
There are no pre-requisites to the exam, however it is broadly recommended that you complete the Salesforce Administrator Certification (as there’s a lot of overlap between the two, and the concepts you’ll learn are expanded upon with the PAB Cert). The exam itself is a 65 question multiple choice (select one out of four options) test, with a passing score of 65%. You can find the full exam guide here.
Salesforce assumes that those taking the exam have the following experience:
6 months to 1 year of experience building applications on the Salesforce Lightning Platform and/or on a similar technology platform.
A candidate for this exam is not expected to be able to administer Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, have programmatic development experience (Apex, Visualforce, etc.), design custom interfaces using Visualforce, or design custom Lightning components using Apex or JavaScript.
My recommendation would be to plan on taking this Certificate within close proximity to your Salesforce Certified Administrator exam due to the overlap between the two. Salesforce recommends completing the preparation Trailmix and Study Trail - I’d also strongly encourage you to complete several Superbadges - namely the Security Specialist, Process Automation Specialist, and App Customisation Specialist.
Once you’ve completed your Trailmixes and Superbadge you’ve covered most of the topics in depth. The Trailmixes and Superbadges don’t spend much time on App Deployment so I used the Focus on Force Study Guide you can find here. I also picked up the Focus on Force Practice Exams at the same time. I was also recommended by fellow Salesforce-r Vera to learn more about Formulas for the exam - they recommended Steven Trubmles course on Udemy that after completing I can highly recommend.
Where does this exam sit in your Salesforce journey? Drawing a parallel from learning Salesforce to undertaking a Bachelor’s Degree the common argument is that your core ‘degree’ would look something like this:
Salesforce Certified Administrator
Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder
Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator
With these electives for Consultants:
Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant
Why these certs for Consultants?
Sales and Service Cloud are the main offerings for Salesforce.
Or these for an in-house Admin:
Salesforce Certified Business Analyst
Salesforce Certified UX Designer
Why these certs for an in-house Admin?
It is unlikely that as an Jr Admin you’ll be setting up a Salesforce environment from scratch. Most likely you’ll be maintaining the current Org, and creating/customizing objects where required. The UX Cert helps you learn how to make your customisation more effective, and accessible to everyone. The BA Cert helps equip you with a framework to slowdown and find out the why behind these changes to make sure the solution will actually address the business needs.
The PAB Certificate is something that due to the broad range of topics covered can benefit most in the ecosystem - but in it’s current iteration it sits in a fairly unique spot.
My concerns having sat the exam are that there is a lot of crossover between the Salesforce Certified Administrator exam and PAB in regards to Salesforce Fundamentals. A lot of the exam focuses on Workflow Rules, Process Builder, Flows, and Apex (and when you would use one instead of another) - however Workflow Rules and Process Builder are being retired in favour of Flow.
As such I’d love to see it refocused to the current landscape of Salesforce - with less of an overlap of the Certified Admin and a stronger focus on Flows vs Apex, and App Deployment. Regardless, In it’s current state I still feel that it was beneficial for me to learn these topics and that as a whole it has made me a better Admin.
For anyone looking to undertake any Salesforce certificate I recommend joining the SFXD community on Discord. Beyond the fantastic tools and resources the community has made and shared, they have a frequently updated bot that tracks discount codes. You can summon the bot by typing ?discounts in the #botchat text channel.
Once you are feeling confident with your progress take the exam - good luck! Embrace failure if it happens and try again next time. Enjoy that reward when you get there.
Tag me in your LinkedIn post when you get certified and I promise I'll be there to support your win!
Looking forward to seeing your certificate.
