As I write this, I’m freshly off my first—and, fingers crossed, final—time in front of a panel of Salesforce Certified Technical Architects. The CTA certification is the ultimate certification in the Salesforce Universe, and as expected, it is as someone said to me in the process “a Salesforce mental Ironman event”.
This day-long experience was my swing at the last step on the journey to becoming a Salesforce CTA myself. I wanted to get some of my thoughts out while the experience (read: mental wounds) are still fresh. I’ve not received my results yet, so these are what (I think) are unbiased opinions about the process and the experience.
First, I want to say what a pleasant surprise it was to experience the support of the CTA Product Managers during the process. Starting a month prior to my board exam date, I began receiving phone calls and emails to familiarize me with what to expect and to make sure I had proper arrangements and all of the preparatory resources they could offer. Salesforce did this in a first-class way, and I felt like I had advocates and guides throughout who were invested in me putting my best effort forward. #Ohana, I guess.
My Background
It’s probably important to note my background, as I believe there are a few different types of candidates pursuing the top certification level at Salesforce. Depending on your background, you’ll likely approach the process differently. My background is historically in software development and enterprise architecture. I spent about 10 years writing web or desktop software and the integrations around those systems prior to focusing on Salesforce alone. A little over 6 years ago, I moved into a Salesforce-only role at Summa, moved to Deloitte’s Salesforce practice, and then returned to Summa 3+ years ago.
My time in the Salesforce space has been spent as a Solution Architect and as Practice Director, where I currently sit. So my background ultimately is very technical, but my experience in Salesforce has been at the business process + technology strategic levels and not deep in code.
My Preparation
After passing the Certified Technical Architect multiple choice exam, I immediately looked to schedule my board exam. I was able to secure a slot about two months into the future. This gave me little time to prepare through the holiday season, but I was also aware that this is a test based heavily on experience—it’s not something you can necessarily “cram” for.
I did review the 9 Architect Journey study guides and thought they were well done. I highly recommend reviewing these and going through the exercises in each. I did the exercises from books on areas in which I felt I lacked depth, but in hindsight, I wish I had done them all multiple times.
I focused on areas in which I have had significant solutioning experience, but not an extreme depth of implementation nuts and bolts. I also made sure to refresh myself if it had been a while since I’d had deep relevant experience in a particular area. This focused me heavily on SSO Authentication and extremely Large Data Volume implementations. For SSO, I solution a lot, but I don’t get into the finer details of the technical exchanges between identity providers in this process. Large Data Volumes is a problem I have worked with in great depth in prior global projects, but it had been a while so I needed to brush up on newer features.
One thing I thought was a disadvantage was that the guides are not available for download or able to be printed from within the ebook provider. This made it more challenging to read them and take notes. When learning in large volumes like this, I prefer to print and take notes directly on a page around relevant text. Unfortunately, that was not an option I could find here.
My Experience with the Board Exam
I had read about the board exam day in some others’ blog posts, and I had talked to others who had gone through it. I knew it was going to be mentally draining. From what I experienced, here are my suggestions for how to prepare for board exam day:
- Fly into your location the day prior to the exam, and get a good night’s sleep. You don’t want to be stressed with early morning flights and cab rides. Where I stayed, I was just a 3-minute walk from the testing location.
- Hydrate the day prior and on the morning of the exam. My test began at 10:30 a.m., so I ate a larger breakfast anticipating no lunch that day (I snuck a banana during a break, but there was no lunch, as expected). To perform in a mentally exhausting exercise like this, you need to prepare as you would for a distance race or event. Hydrate and feed your brain prior.
- The morning of, I did review the study materials for about 30 minutes, but otherwise made sure I stayed off of screens until my exam. Screen time fatigues your brain, so don’t do more of it that morning than you absolutely have to.
At 10:30am I was brought into the office by Salesforce CTA Product Managers. They again reviewed the process, and at 10:45 I was provided with the case study (digital and physical copies), a laptop with no internet to create a Powerpoint on, and 8-10 flip chart pages that stick to the wall. A timer was set for 2 hours, the time I would have to read, digest and solution against the case provided.
To respect the integrity of the test, I won’t go into detail of what was in the case study, but here’s some high-level information on what to anticipate. The case study was 9 pages, single-spaced and covered an extremely complex, global implementation scenario. This covers all of the areas you would expect, including all but the newest Salesforce products. It involves large data migrations, varied integration patterns and complex security/reporting requirements.
After my two hours for case review and solutioning was over, I was given a break of about 15 minutes before being taken into the board exam room. Three Certified Technical Architects made up the review board. They really were excellent at professionally questioning and articulating positions, and they all obviously were among the deepest in the world on this platform.
For the first 45 minute presentation session, you are in a position to state your understanding of the case, your solution approaches and your justifications for those approaches. One thing that was jarring to me: the board is not permitted to talk AT ALL during this session. They will not respond to you, they will not make comments or ask questions. For most of their time in this session, they are not looking at you, but instead furiously taking notes and typing as you talk. At Summa, we practice a Design Thinking approach and engage our customers actively in workshop settings. For me, this CTA format was odd compared to my daily interactions with clients and did put me off my game for this session. I presented my findings and understandings, and ultimately my positions, for 31 minutes and 50 seconds. I know this exact time, because all remaining time was then added to the second session.
After a 10 minute break, where I was given a rousing pep talk by my CTA program sherpas (this sounds corny, but at this point I really needed this!), the second session began. This final session is composed of Q&A directed by the CTA board. In other words, it’s their turn to talk. I had 58 minutes and 10 seconds on the clock (45 minutes plus my remaining time from the previous session). This was one of the more brutal hours of my time in the Salesforce ecosystem. The board members had strategized during the break to focus on areas they felt I did not cover in enough depth or showed weakness on in the first session. To be very clear, they were not aggressive or actively trying to “trip me up”. They asked guiding questions in thoughtful ways. When I didn’t answer in enough depth or address exactly what they wanted, they asked again in constructive ways to help me understand what they were searching for. We had a few episodes of active discussions back and forth, as well. Though it was definitely not their intention, I left this session feeling like I needed to go back and do some beginner Trailheads—I wasn’t sure that I really knew anything at all about Salesforce!
The Wait
I’m now in the 2 week waiting period for my test results, and I’ll update this post (good or bad) with what that outcome is when I receive it. Regardless, this experience was well worth the time and investment. It was extremely challenging and exhausting, and in the short term ego-damaging, but it was really fun to be challenged by some of the best in the ecosystem that we all work in everyday.
My Reflections
Briefly (sorry for the extremely long post already), here are two important things I will do differently if I do have to retake the exam:
- I’d use the two hour case study session to prepare for the first presentation session in a very different way than I did. My strategy was to first read through the entire case while taking notes with pen/paper and drawing some initial diagrams there. I then spent the second hour reading back through my notes and diagrams and drawing more final versions on the larger flip chart pages. But reading through the case the first time took me about 50 minutes, leaving me an hour to start my final presentation prep. There simply (by design, I assume) is not enough time to consume all of the information in the case. If I take the board again, I’ll go through this part of the process faster and at a higher level, drawing diagrams on the flip charts as I go.
- It seemed acceptable to have notes on the case and just read from them in the presentation. Though I would never do this in front of a client, this is an effective strategy during this test. Some areas of the case have numbered lists of requirements—here, turning to notes in the final 13 minutes of the first session would’ve helped me make absolutely sure I had covered every area.
If you have the opportunity to take the Board Exam I would highly recommend it, and hopefully this post will help you prepare (or commiserate after). Good luck to everyone on this path!
