(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Borut Trdina)

Salesforce has launched its gamified ‘Trailhead’ platform out of beta today, offering newcomers and experienced developers a chance to brush-up their skills and potentially land a new job. We caught up with the company’s Vice President of Developer Relations, Guillaume Roques, about the launch and what its plans are moving forward. 

With the financial impact of the Salesforce ecosystem forecasted to add 1 million jobs and $272 billion to local economies globally by 2019, according to figures by IDC, there are more developers than ever looking to add skills for Salesforce to their CVs. In fact, additional research from Wanted Analytics suggests that having skills at using Salesforce can lead to a $20,000 salary premium for staff in the USA. 

Trailhead launched in beta just a few months ago to unprecedented reception. Roques spoke about the platform and who it’s targeting: “Trailhead is a training platform on how to use Salesforce. We are providing training for Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Wave Analytics for now, but we’re planning to extend the reach of Trailhead.” 

Most courses are expensive, part of why the unemployed struggle to attain the skills required to get them on the career ladder. Trailhead however is free, and offers “badges” as proof of reaching particular milestones. Whilst the system could be cheated, most people would soon be found out so it makes little sense to do so.

Gamification helps to increase engagement whilst providing users with a more rewarding experience.

Roques explained the learning process: “We organise training by ‘trails’ which each contain modules. At the end of each module, you have challenges which test your knowledge and whether you are capable of moving onto the next one. For succeeding at these challenges you will get points and badges which you can proudly share with your community and friends on social networks.” 

“You can also practice what you learn through ‘projects’, which enable you to build real stuff. For example, you could be a developer who has learnt a lot about the platform and can now put that into practice with a project which teaches you to build a concrete application.” 

Gamification helps to increase engagement whilst providing users with a more rewarding experience. It has become used for a host of online training platforms – such as Treehouse and Codeacademy – to great effect. When asked if he felt the inclusion of gamification techniques had a big impact on Trailhead’s response, Roques said: “This is definitely part of the success of Trailhead – the gamification, the fact people can share their achievements, even the idea of competition between each other.” 

Salesforce has a huge ecosystem with a large number of existing developers, but some experienced developers might dismiss Trailhead as being aimed at newcomers and miss the opportunity to learn something new or brush-up on their skills. “Right now we observe a lot of beginners, but we’re also starting to see more seasoned developers joining Trailhead in order to learn new things or get a bit more detail on existing things.” 

Impressively, the Trailhead community has already earned over 250,000 badges and will now expand its reach much further through localising in French, German, and Japanese. These languages, and their subsequent home markets, are where Salesforce is growing the fastest. EMEA as a whole has the fastest growth year-over-year for Salesforce.

Research from Wanted Analytics suggests that having skills at using Salesforce can lead to a $20,000 salary premium

Although in the EMEA we’re yet to see people recruited as a direct result of Trailhead, in the US some companies have begun training employees using the learning platform. Roques points towards a lack of localisation until now for the reason behind few examples in the EMEA region. 

The industry overall is attempting to get more women into developer roles to help close the significant gender gap between males and females. When asked if Trailhead has seen interest from women as much as men, Roques said: “That’s a very good question, and the interesting thing here is we’re seeing a lot of female developers using Trailhead. It seems the gamification and ‘no barrier’ entry is a big enabler for them to learn Salesforce.” 

Trailhead exits beta today and is now available in English, French, German, and Japanese. Moving forward, Salesforce wants to localise more of the trails (22 are localised at launch) and create more to cover other areas of their vast ecosystem. Head over to Trailhead’s website to get started. 

Do you plan on learning Salesforce abilities using Trailhead? Let us know in the comments.