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I'm currently a stay at home mom with a background in IT and looking into the future since my daughter will be going to school in 2015 and then I want to get back into the workforce.

A friend recently suggested I get into Salesforce but I have not even heard of it till now. From what I can see it reminds me of share point a bit.

My background include; web design/development, FileMake design/development, some SQL and other database, IT admin and of course IT help desk/tech etc.

My question is - if you were me what would you do now since I'm at home to get me going into a great job when the time comes?

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    Hi Lani and welcome to the Salesforce StackExchange community. One thing to note is that unfortunately this type of question usually doesn't do well on this site. One of the things about this site is that it is very specific, non-opinion based information. Your question prompts for a discussion, which doesn't work well for our format. Feel free to take a tour of the site - salesforce.stackexchange.com/tour - to learn more about the features. This specific question is better suited for a forum. I suggest checking out the Success Community - success.salesforce.com Jun 18, 2014 at 14:12
  • thanks! I found it via a question that was similar so thought this might be the place to post - you can delete and will post on suggested site.
    – Lani
    Jun 18, 2014 at 14:14
  • No problem at all! Salesforce is an amazing platform and is currently one of the best IT skills to possess - businessinsider.com/resume-tech-skills-ranked-by-salary-2014-3 - As you continue working with the platform, please continue to visit our community and participate! There is a ton of valuable information here and a bunch of great technical minds willing and ready to help. Jun 18, 2014 at 14:17
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    I also hadn't heard of salesforce when I took a job in it 2.5 years ago. Haven't regretted doing so for a single day so far. Good luck with things. Jun 18, 2014 at 14:28

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Just to give you some information, even though this may be viewed as an opinion, your best bet is typically the Force.com Fundamentals book.

Force.com Fundamentals is an introduction to the Force.com platform, designed to lead the reader through the functionality provided natively by the Force.com platform. The book walks the reader through the creation of a standard recruiting application.

Force.com Fundamentals is aimed at administrators and programmers looking to learn about the capabilities of the platform. Your application grows in robustness and flexibility as you work through the examples in Fundamentals.

The book covers designing and creating Force.com objects, modifying the appearance of the standard Force.com interface, the Force.com security scheme, collaborating with Chatter, reporting on your data, and using workflows and approvals. The book also introduces the use of Visualforce pages and sites to integrate external functionality.

It is a really solid starting point and you can go from there.

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You can get your own Developer org in order to get started:

https://developer.salesforce.com/en/signup?d=70130000000td6N

This is a Sandbox that let's you do any sort of customizations you want. The main restriction is the low data cap, but when trying to learn the system it shouldn't be an issue.

Once you have this, I would work on getting a Salesforce Admin certification. There should be classes available associated with this that you can find. After that, I would recommend getting the Developer certification (it honestly has very little development involved and is still fairly easy). After you are familiar with these aspects of it, I would try to look into some of the Advanced Developer classes/work as this will be closer to Web Development that you might be familiar with. In particular in the Advanced aspect, I would learn Visualforce pages. Past that it might be helpful to learn Apex (potentially learn some basic Java first since Apex is closely similar). Find out a little about the Model View Controller architecture and you should be in a good position (besides work experience) for a job.

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