I recently passed my 7th Salesforce certification exam using a new technique (new for me anyways) and I decided to share it here. Don't worry, I'm a man of few words, so it's pretty short but also pretty sweet. 🙂 I hope you will find it useful.

When I was studying for the Platform Developer 1 certification a few years ago, I took good notes of the study guide on Focus on Force. However, even the summary of my summary was 247 pages! It worked, but it was total overkill. I needed to find a better way to study and I had been reading about using flashcards and spaced repetition, but it sounded just as tedious.

I decided to give it a try anyway to prepare for the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant certification exam. It flowed very naturally and I ended up with about 500 flashcards — which sounds like a lot but they filled "only" 56 pages. 

However, it was 56 pages of distilled knowledge in a question/answer format in my own words (I dislike the word "utilize", so I made sure there isn't even one occurrence of it in my flashcards).

I read through the cards a few times and did the sectional practice exams. One thing I REALLY love about those are the answer explanations with links to Salesforce documentation and screenshots. It's such a great way to re-inforce your learning.

I passed the actual exam in less then an hour on my first try. I marked only the questions where I wasn't 100% sure for review and did not touch the others. Typically my first answer to a question is the right one, and I didn't want to mess that up by introducing any doubts. Just read the questions carefully and trust your gut!

I didn't even need to do the spaced repetition thing, although I will definitely give that a try as well for my next certification prep.

One thing is for sure: I will never go back to "classic" (read: verbose) notetaking. How do you study for your Salesforce certification exams?

PS: Just in case you were wondering, I created the image above in the Dreamstudio Graphics Generator app with the prompt "The scene is an office. In the foreground is a male college student typing on his computer with text on the screen and a dashboard on the board drawn in the style of fun 2D vector artwork."

What a time to be alive! 🙂