Salesforce Administrator is the certification most Salesforce careers start with, and the one employers ask for most. It is broad rather than deep: the exam checks that you can set up and run an org sensibly, not that you have memorised every setting. That makes the order you learn it in, and how you practise, matter more than the hours you put in.
What the exam covers
Salesforce publishes the current topics and their weighting in the exam guide on Trailhead. In practice the material falls into these areas, which is also how Arkton’s course is organised:
- Org setup: company settings, the user interface and the options every org starts with.
- User management: users, profiles, permission sets and how people log in.
- Security and access: organisation-wide defaults, the role hierarchy, sharing rules and field-level security.
- Objects and fields: standard and custom objects, relationships, field types, page layouts and record types.
- Sales and marketing: leads, opportunities, campaigns, products and price books.
- Service and support: cases, queues, assignment and escalation rules, and knowledge.
- Productivity and collaboration: activities, Chatter and the mobile app.
- Data and analytics: reports, report types and dashboards.
- Automation: Flow, which Salesforce now recommends for automation, and approval processes.
- Data management: importing data, validation rules and duplicate management.
Learn it in this order
- The data model first. Objects, fields and relationships are the ground everything else stands on.
- Then security. Once you know what records exist, learn who can see and change them. Many exam scenarios are really security questions.
- Then automation. Flows act on records and respect (or deliberately bypass) security, so they make sense after both.
- Then reports and dashboards. Report types are much easier once relationships are clear.
- Finally the sales and service apps, which put all of the above together.
Practise in a real org
Reading about sharing rules is not the same as watching a user fail to see a record. Salesforce gives you free Developer Edition orgs and Trailhead Playgrounds: build a small app, create two users with different profiles, and check what each can see. Every hour spent clicking through setup pays back on exam day.
Use practice exams to find gaps
Take a full practice exam once you have covered every area, not before. Then look at your score by domain rather than the total, go back to the lessons for your weakest high-weight area, and try again. We explain how in Read a practice exam the way an examiner would.
Before you book
Read the current exam guide on Trailhead for the latest topics, length and passing score, and book when you are passing practice exams comfortably rather than just scraping through.
How Arkton helps
Arkton’s Salesforce Administrator course has 39 lessons, hands-on labs and exam preparation, about 33 hours of material in all. My Plan spreads it across the weeks before your exam, and practice exams score you domain by domain.