Passing the Salesforce Platform Developer I Exam

Introduction & Background

Since passing my Salesforce Platform Developer I exam recently, many people have got in touch to ask for hints and tips on how to pass without taking the formal training programme provided by Salesforce. So I thought I'd write down the strategy and techniques I used to help me prepare.

At the time of writing this, below is the most up to date Study Guide which Salesforce provide for prospective students: http://certification.salesforce.com/SG_CertifiedPlatformDeveloperI.pdf

To provide you some background, I'd been working with Salesforce for around five months focusing mainly on full stack app development when I took the exam. I began revising every evening three weeks before the exam date to make sure I was fully prepared and had covered all the topics raised in the study guide.

Revision

What I found when trying to attempt to revise for the Developer Platform I is that a lot of the non-Salesforce resources online are actually specifically for the DEV 401 and DEV 501 exams, which have now been retired and replaced by the Platform Developer I and II exam (this transition happened in Sept 2015). Its important to watch out for this because the specification for the new exam is quite different (e.g no advanced apex section) and you don't want to be caught out trying to learn the wrong things.

My primary technique to revise for the exam was to write a list of everything which needed covering and then identifying all the questions they might ask around that sub-topic and all the resources from which I could revise from. I'd recommend the list in this blog post to work from: http://eternussolutions.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/my-experience-with-salesforce-platform.html - But make the Salesforce Study guide your primary reference!

Here is a few topics I'd suggest taking extra time to make sure you understand and are confident answering questions around:

• Governor Limits
• Save Order of Execution - Absolutely critical you understand each step!
• Master-Detail relationships - Specifically the limitations of being the parent object in terms of data flow
• Deployment between orgs - Which orgs can and cannot deploy to one another

Exam

What I found effective running up to the exam was using revision cards to ensure I remembered all of the content I had learnt (especially governor limits and object limits!). There is an online store of revision cards similar to the ones I used here: http://www.cram.com/flashcards/salesforce-platform-developer-1-7144847

Some final tips for taking the exam are as follows:

1. Use your time effectively, you have nearly two minutes per question.
2. Mark difficult questions 'for review' which means at the end of the exam you can go through those questions specifically to give yourself more time on them.
3. As this exam is a multiple choice exam use the process of elimination when struggling to find the right answer.
4. Don't Stress! The pass mark for the exam is 68% and there are 60 questions, which means you could potentially get 18 answers wrong and still pass.

Summary

Overall I found the process of taking the Salesforce Platform Developer I exam quite rewarding. I noticed areas which myself and my team weren't using the platform to its fullest and areas where we could change our apex implementations to be more robust and efficient which I fed back to my team and has improved our development standards.

Good Luck and I hope this proves helpful for some of you!