About this time last year I decided to pursue a career within Salesforce, I was a bit tired of my current job and wanted a change. It was either a backend engineer role at iZettle or becoming a Salesforce Consultant. The consultant role was not new to me since that’s how I started my career. After signing the contract I decided to look at Trailhead since I heard a lot of good things about it.
I took my first badge, Salesforce Platform Basics at 2016-10-04 20:32 UTC and it was quite easy. My goal was to take a bunch before I started working on the 2:nd of January 2017. That didn’t happen but I started doing them from my first day in the office.
Having worked with Salesforce since 5/11/2012 I thought I knew most of the platform but that was far from the truth. Platform Cache, Hierarchical Custom settings, Shield, Communities, Live Agent, etc. I haven’t worked with much of it but today I still know how the features works and if a customer asks me about it I can at give a brief explanation about most things.
Back to the gamification part, at EINS we set a goal for 2017 to have at least 98% of all badges between us in the team. Using partners.salesforce.com for calculating this value is really hard so I set out to build a dashboard for the team so that we could see our score.
After some iterations it looks ok, Lightning Design System makes everything looks great.
It looks awesome on your phone too
The dashboard has really helped, mostly because people in the team now sees who took a badge over the weekend and when someone passes their total number of badges. This has encouraged everyone to go that extra mile and take that extra badge.
Healthy competition is always good and when you learn things that helps you make a better job while at it it’s definitely a win-win!
Feel free to check out the dashboard at http://trailhead.eins.se/, also if you click a persons name you can see which badges he/she is missing. This makes it easy when you’re looking for a quick badge to take on the subway or the bus.
Another addition was the #architectjourney pyramid at the bottom, since we’re scraping certifications too
The last thing we added to the dashboard was Slack notifications when someone completes a badge or gets a Salesforce Certification, of course the first version of this spammed all over our #trailhead channel but that bug is long gone now.
Exporting the data in CSV and importing it into Wave lets you gain some insights into when people take badges (and when they work)
So in summary, Trailhead gamification totally works but you need a dashboard.
Cheers, Johan
PS. My aim is to clean up the code and put it on GitHub when I have the time DS.