From Electrical Engineer to Salesforce Consultant 💡

“Making a career switch from 8 years of engineering to Salesforce is definitely super outside of my comfort zone and I’m super glad that I did it - everything has changed for me in a good way.””

Meet Ryan Ko, who made the leap from Electrical Engineer to Salesforce Consultant with our Salesforce Admin course, ‘Zero to 100’. In this quick interview, Ryan shares his Salesforce journey with us, tips for working and communicating with the team remotely, and advice for those starting their Salesforce careers. 

What has been the highlight of your Salesforce career so far?

The highlight for me so far is getting a job that suits my background, my previous experience, and skills. Prior to my salesforce consultant role, I was an engineering consultant, working with clients from various project cycles, spanning from project scoping, detailed design implementation, through to construction and commissioning. It’s been great to start my salesforce career in a consultancy, as it’s a familiar environment for me and I’ve always enjoy working with people and deliver great solutions for clients.

Have you had any challenges or anything unexpected?

I quite enjoy the agile development approach and how the Salesforce projects move very fast. In my previous role as an engineering consultant, I’ve always been involved in very large projects, which can take 2 to 3 years to complete from start to finish. I quite enjoy delivering work in small but consumable increments and continuously evaluating requirements, plans and results.

What is a valuable skill you’ve learned on the job?

Source Control using Git in Visual Studio Code. It’s been great learning about how multiple people can work together in the same salesforce project and applying source control for my projects.

What kind of support have you been getting from your team?

Everything! Everyone’s been quite supportive and helping me out with onboarding, timesheets and answering technical questions. My colleagues have been helping me out a lot with understanding how source control works and how to use Git commands and Bitbucket for pulling and pushing changes through.

How did Salesforce Training help with your Salesforce career?

The course is very well structured. For the first few weeks, I learnt a lot of about the Salesforce fundamentals from the daily tasks, weekly summary sessions and Q&A sessions. The part of the course that helped me the most with my career is the real-word project, where I spent 5 weeks building an org from scratch for a real estate company. I learnt a great deal about security, data structure, flow, lightning app builder, object relationships, validation rule, assignment rule, etc. The last part of the course (exam prep) is well organised, where I was given cheat sheets for each topic and practice questions to test my knowledge. I find the course resources very useful for the salesforce admin exam and also for my current job as a quick reference guide too.

What are some tips for remote work?

I’ve been working remotely for over two years now and one thing that helped me the most is to write up some notes on what to do tomorrow at the end of the day. I recently read a book called “Work from Home Hacks” and have learnt a few useful tips and tricks. In the book, it talks about establishing a routine. It’s important to start at the same time, have lunch at the same time, finish at the same time, and clean your working space at the end of the day. It’s great to start your day with a clean desk.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give someone starting their Salesforce career in 2022?

I highly recommend doing the Salesforce Admin course, ‘Zero to 100’. The course really prepared me well for a good start for my Salesforce career. One advice I would give is to think about what transferable skills and experience you can leverage into a Salesforce career.

What’s next for you?

I want to keep improving my Salesforce skills, so I’ve set a goal to do a new Salesforce badge every two days! My goal is to get at least 2 certifications this year.