I took Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification exam on 31st Jan’17 and cleared it. In this post, I am going to write down how I approached this certification and my study materials as well.

First, to start you, you need the Salesforce Advanced Administration Certification guide. You can download the same from here. The exam format is –

  • Number of questions: 63
  • Type of questions: Multiple-Choice
  • Passing Score: 65%
  • Time: 90 Minutes

So basically you need to answer ~41 questions correctly. 
Note – You need to clear Salesforce Certified Administration Certification before this certification.

 Strategy:
I followed the below strategy by reviewing the certification guide and bucketing the items based on their weightages. This is the formula I followed, topics with more than 10% weightage are my priority items and rest of the items are kind of last minute items to check.

 With the above strategy, I came up with the below list –

  • Security and Access
  • Sales Cloud Applications
  • Service Cloud Applications
  • Data Management
  • Change Management
  • Analytics, Reports and Dashboards
  • Process Automation
But definitely, I was not sure whether I can answer all the questions correctly from above lists. So my backup plan was to make myself comfortable with the below items as well –
  • Extending Custom Objects and Applications
  • Auditoring and Monitoring
These two sections are comparatively very easy and easily you can answer all the questions correctly. The only section which I was not sure and didn’t put any effort at all was – Content Management. Note – I got 2-3 questions from this section in the actual exam.

Study Material:
I started with Partner Training – Administrator Essentials for Experienced Admin (ADM 211). I will highly recommend you to go through this training if you have access to it. The entire training is very much focused. It is my experience that if you can complete these training, 80% of your preparation is done. This training will not cover the Service Cloud part of the certification. But if you have access to Partner Training, there is another training which you should consider as well – Service Cloud for Admin.

But if you don’t have access to the partner training, you can concentrate on the below study materials to understand the concept needed. I am writing them below –
I have mentioned all my study materials at the top. Apart from studying individual concepts, I tried to practice the same in my developer org. Practicing the items in your developer org will help you to understand the concept. Remember – Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification is all about how much you are comfortable with concepts and have you done implementation before on those concepts? So practicing in your developer org will give you that extra edge for sure.

Finally, I have completed few Mock Exams to understand my readiness. Again, don’t trust any of the Mock Exam. Use them to understand which section of the exam you need to put more effort. Repeat this same step multiple times until and unless you get the answer – YES for the question – AM I READY FOR THE EXAM?

Below are few Mock Exams I used –

– Sudipta

Feel free to add your comments and add resources which helped you.