The Salesforce Business Analyst Certification is a great certification to understand the most crucial techniques and tools used by business analysts in the agile development process.
In 2022 salesforce released this certification to help fill a need in the ecosystem to help standardize the business analyst/project management education.
While this certification could be labeled as a beginner salesforce certification it has immense value for all salesforce and salesforce adjacent professionals.
The tips and tricks learned in preparation for this exam are crucial for understanding stakeholders, coworkers, users and saving time in the development lifecycle!
Personally, I took this exam a few months after is was released and it has been extremely helpful in my day-to-day on the salesforce ecosystem.
Further down on this post, I will mention my experience taking the exam and the different resources used and that have since been made available! These resources will be marked free or paid to help you get this cert with resources that fit in your budget!
Feel free to save this post and bounce around to the different sections!
Youtube Video
Before we jump too far into the post I want to mention that there is a corresponding youtube video on the Salesforce Emily youtube channel.
I will embed that here but keep scrolling to get to the good stuff!
Overview of the Business Analyst Certification
Next let’s jump into the specifics of the business analyst exam.
This exam helps you to understand the tips and tricks that a business analyst should know. Also, this will help standardize some processes that are in the business analyst world!
Personally, I found this exam to help me understand a lot of contextual pieces to the agile project management process that I was fuzzy on.
Some quick stats on the exam:
- $200 initial exam fee; $100 retakes
- No Prerequisites
- 60-65 total questions
- Timed: 1 hour 45 minutes to complete
- Online or Onsite proctoring is available
- Passing score: 72%
- Multiple Choice – Choose 1 answer out of 3
There are six sections on this exam, let’s break them down!
Customer Discovery 17%.
This section covers a really important process which is engaging with your customers to understand what they are really seeking in a solution. This includes specifics such as elicitation techniques and analyzing where the customer currently is in their pain points.
Collaboration with Stakeholders 24%.
This section goes more in-depth into the different conversations you will have with each type of stakeholder. This includes understanding all types of stakeholders, their roles, and how to bring them to the table to work collaboratively!
Business Process Mapping 16%.
This section covers a wide variety of different visual maps and exercises to use in order to successfully understand and communicate business processes. While this section might seem tedious is extremely important to be able to successfully communicate and deliver a quality solution to your customers and stakeholders.
Requirements 17%
This section covers how to gather project wants and needs from the stakeholders. This is not always an easy task as it can require a lot of digging to figure out what is best for the business and the customer. Also, requirements are just what is wanted in a future state and some specifics to help guide the user stories later on!
User Stories 18%.
This section covers the creation process of user stories and the differences in what different stakeholders would label as done! User stories are very rigid in how they are structured but have multiple pieces to help the admins and developers do their jobs without much hindrance.
User Acceptance 8%
This section covers one of the final stages a business analyst is a steward over. Much of user acceptance testing is for the users to be able to go in and sign off on a job well done before it is released to a wide audience. As you can imagine this does not always result in a yes so it covers the different ways you can handle the various scenarios.
My Background when taking the Salesforce Business Analyst Certification
One thing that I’ve always found beneficial when looking at these types of blog posts or youtube videos is understanding where the person giving the advice was at in their understanding when taking the exam.
A person with decades of work experience in the field will see this exam very differently from someone who is just at the beginning of their career!
This way you can understand where my advice is coming from and gauge where you are in comparison to my experience!
At the time of taking this exam, I had been working on the Salesforce platform for over 7 years.
First, as an end user/receptionist for 4 years then working in an administration role for the next 3 years.
I had a variety of full-time and part-time salesforce roles during that tenure.
While I was working in an agile environment with business analysts, I had never been a full-time business analyst.
So this exam is definitely achievable if you have no formal business analyst experience!
Resources I used when taking the Salesforce Business Analyst Certification
Next, let’s jump into the resources I used for passing this exam!
It is important to note that there weren’t many great resources at the time I took this exam. So what I used for the exam was pretty limited compared to what I will mention in the additional resources I’ve vetted!
First, I always look at the exam guide (free) to help me get oriented towards the logistics and some specifics of what’s covered on the exam.
Then, I will start working on the official trailmix (free) to learn some additional specifics. While the trailmix doesn’t cover the full information you find on the exam it will help you fill in some holes in your knowledge!
Note: It usually trailmixes take days or weeks to complete. However, I use a Chrome extension called natural reader (free with paid addons) to help me listen to it faster. With the extension, it took about 2 days to get through the trailmix.
Finally, I took the focus on force practice exams (paid). At the time there were only 2 exams and I used them to gauge readiness for the actual exam. Having scored in the 90% on both I used those exam reports to help guide my study before my scheduled exam time.
After scoring well within passing I felt comfortable enough to take the exam. I studied for 4 days before taking the exam and was able to pass on the first try!
Things other than experience that helped
While I did rely on some of my previous business analyst adjacent experience, it wasn’t the only thing that helped me to pass on the first attempt.
This exam was extremely term focused! So I really tried to study the business analyst terminology and know the context for that terminology
For example, knowing when to use universal process notation and some of its quirks.
Or knowing the formula for creating a great user story with acceptance criteria!
Another aspect of passing that wasn’t experience based was the process of elimination. This exam was structured to choose 1 out of 3 possible answers.
This structure is different than most exams that have a choose 1 out of 4 or 2 out of 5 possible answers.
So it was easy for me to eliminate one answer that obviously wasn’t correct and either make an educated guess or debate between the two remaining answers.
Additional Resources for the Salesforce Business Analyst Certification
Now that some time has passed there are a lot more resources available!
Here are some of my favorites!
First is my course on Preparing for the Business Analyst Certification Exam (paid). This gives you a strong foundation to pass with a full practice exam and a glossary with all the terms you need to know and master to be able to pass!
Then there are some notes (free) from a fellow blogger that cover a good amount of the terms!
Don’t be afraid to fail on your first try! I’ve failed so many salesforce exams!
Use the scoring to help guide your studies to turn those weaknesses into strengths!
For example, if you score 25% in the customer discovery section, study those concepts as much as possible to make up the most ground on the exam.
My Thoughts on the Salesforce Business Analyst Certification
Now that we’ve gone over the details on the exam I want to go over my thoughts on the exam.
Personally, this exam was fairly easy for me to pick up because I had some previous experience working with business analysts. It wasn’t a lot of experience.
However, I was super focused on learning the terminology to pass and the necessary context.
This exam was also different than the other salesforce exams because it wasn’t super niche in the questions they asked.
For example, on the admin or app builder you may get questions on some very niche technical aspect of salesforce. This was not the case on the business analyst exam.
Will this certification get me a job?
This question is asked a LOT of anyone who gets this certification.
Short answer, no. I personally don’t think this certification is enough to land a business analyst job. Even if you have other certifications.
It is pretty rare to find a certification that will be enough to help you land a job with just the certification.
The admin certification was like that in 2019 but is no longer that way. However, I do think that the Developer 2 certification is still like that in some circumstances.
Although this certification is likely not enough to help you land the job, the skills learned are so valuable to any job you land.
It will definitely make your projects go smoother in the future!
Conclusion
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