In Mason Frank’s Careers and Hiring Guide, almost half (47%) of Salesforce professionals told us that better opportunities for career progression, development, or a defined career path would entice them into taking on a new role.
This demonstrates the hungry appetite tech talent has to keep moving their Salesforce career forward. But how can you ensure that you’re always putting one foot in front of the other?
Certifications, specialized skills, AI—there’s a whole lot to consider when trying to make the right choices for your career, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. So, we sat down with Sara Hernández to help make sense of it all.
Sara’s qualifications speak for themselves. She’s a Systems Engineer and currently a Salesforce Solution Architect, with 11X Salesforce Certifications and experience in different industries including Banking and Insurance. Sara has worked in implementing technology solutions that optimize business processes and improve operational efficiency, as well as in projects of migrations and integrations. Her passion for innovation and communities has led her to specialize in Salesforce, where she continues to drive the use of the platform and ecosystem to solve complex problems in the business world.
Sara is also passionate about social impact and today she is the founder of WomenforceIt, an NGO that helps women to join the Salesforce ecosystem and a driver of content in Spanish, created the Salesforce Podcast Crónicas.
Find a summary of Sara’s invaluable insights for each question below, or just play the video to hear her unmissable tips first-hand! And don’t forget to head over to our Careers and Hiring Guide mini-site to discover Sara’s top tips for accelerating your Salesforce career.
Mason Frank's Salesforce
Careers and Hiring Guide
What has your career journey looked like to date, and what obstacles did you have to overcome to make it to where you are today?
My career started as a system engineer, but even then I really wanted to be a doctor! It was my grandma who insisted I should pursue technology, and today, I have a 16-year career. Sometimes people don’t believe that I have 16 years’ experience because I’m still young, but I got my first technology job at 19!
During this journey, I’ve had to leave my country. Relocating has been one of the main career obstacles I’ve faced, but it’s also been very satisfying to learn how to adapt to other cultures, other languages, different processes and different work. I try to take advantage of that.
Today I’m mostly in Spain, which is where I live, and Salesforce is my core focus—I’m very happy to have specialized in this amazing ecosystem!
You hold an impressive number of certifications. What value do you believe they bring, and how can Salesforce professionals use certifications to further enhance their career opportunities?
Certification paths add value within the Salesforce ecosystem, but from a knowledge and platform engagement perspective, they’re crucial.
Each certification represents a deep dive into a specific area of Salesforce—Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and so on—so you need to try to find your path. And think about what you want in your path. For example, you have a specific certification if you’re interested in a more of a strategic role, or an architect role, or a consultant role etc.
Certifications are powerful tools for career advancement, too—they bring credibility and can make a difference in job markets. They ensure that professionals not only understand best practice but also know how to apply them in work scenarios.
Employers often value certified professionals not only because they train on high level or technical processes, but also because they demonstrate a proactive attitude toward learning and upskilling in a constantly evolving ecosystem.
So you can combine technical skills with soft skills and functionality skills, and for me, that’s very important and can really help you stand out on the job market. You might not have the experience, but employers could still be impressed by your proactiveness.
Just remember that while certifications are very important, it’s still more important to actually have knowledge and practice.
What are the main emerging trends across the ecosystem that Salesforce professionals can begin upskilling in today?
Salesforce is a constantly evolving ecosystem, meaning it’s hard to keep up with everything all of the time—and this can be frustrating! But as a major business challenge today, one area you can’t afford to be missing is artificial intelligence.
As a professional, your focus needs to be on learning more about Salesforce AI—Agentforce, prompt builders, Einstein, Data Cloud and so on. All roles change, meaning you need to be learning other skills. It’s no longer solely developer or admin, for example, and you need to adapt your mindset from this siloed way of thinking.
Another good area to upskill is debugs and automation using tools like the debug center to try to optimize the development cycle. All change related to setup, for example—for me, that’s where everyone should upskill and what they need to understand across different roles.
You don’t need to understand everything, but it’s important you can answer: why do you need this and what is this for?
How do you expect the ecosystem to evolve over the next few years, and what impact do you think this will have on the career journeys of Salesforce professionals?
I expect the Salesforce ecosystem to evolve with integrations of artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. I think this is the primary focus, and it’s very interesting as it allows companies to optimize their processes and personalize the customer experience even better.
I also expect growth in the use of industry-specific solutions. I’m working with an insurance company right now with an emphasis on real-time data management with Data Cloud, for example.
There’s going to be a real demand for upskills both in artificial intelligence and these specific industry specializations, so those who adapt to skills in these areas will have a competitive advantage. This will put you front of the line for more strategic roles like Solution Architect, in my case, or specialized consultants, administrators, and developers.
The rapid evolution of the ecosystem really will open up a lot of new opportunities for Salesforce professionals.
You can find more of Sara’s invaluable insights on her X and LinkedIn pages. And don’t forget to check out her comments in Mason Frank’s Careers and Hiring Guide to learn more about how professionals can keep moving forward in their career.
