Advanced Admin 211 Certification

Question

I am new to this site and I am not sure if this is a right forum to post my question. My apologies if not. Please redirect me to the correct site. Thanks.

I completed my SF Developer cert, SF ADMIN cert, now I am planning to take my Advanced Admin certification.

I have gone through lot of quizlets and other study guides available for Advanced Admin.

I have spent almost a month in preparing for this Cert and I am able to spend at least 2-3 hours per day for preparation.

I just have few questions: 1. What is the average preparation time required for Advanced admin 2. Any important links or guides that I need to go through which is a "MUST" as part of preparation for Advanced ADMIN 3.Has anyone took the advanced admin winter 14 exam and anything has changed ? or anything new in the format where we need to focus additionally.

Appreciate your valuable feedback.

Answer 1

1) You should be working with the system for a few months before you take it. Typically I tell people to try and study for about 40 hours before attempting to take a certification.

2) I actually wrote a blog post on how to prepare and take the Advanced Admin Certification:

From my experience, I found the Salesforce Study Guide to be pretty accurate for all of the exams. Also, if you are a partner, you can find training videos in the Partner Portal which contains all of the videos listed under "Recommended Training and References" in the study guide. Watch these videos. Also, it never hurts to know the Force.com Fundamentals. For this specific exam, I would have a very good understanding of:

• Sharing
• Role Hierarchy
• Reports and Dashboards
• Native CRM functionality - Understand objects like Opportunities, Leads, Accounts, etc.
• Objects - Know the difference between standard and custom
• Capabilities of Chatter
• User Configuration
• Validation Rules
• Data Loader
• Page Layouts
• Record Types
• Understanding the Debug Log
• Salesforce Knowledge
• Salesforce Ideas
• Salesforce CRM Content
• Deployments
• Approval Process
• User Profiles
• Advanced Currency Management

Note: These are just some things to focus on, there will be questions outside of these particular topics. Focus on the Exam outline in the Study guide.

3) The exam changes a bit with every release to include questions about new features. It is important to keep up to date with the latest and greatest Salesforce has to offer.

Answer 2

(1) The average preparation time will vary enormously depending on the experience of the candidate. I probably spent 5-10 hours in total, but I'd passed the Technical Architect certification a couple of months before, and had years of experience.

(2) My advice is to make sure that you've implemented all of the features/areas mentioned in the study guide - even if its only in a developer edition. That's where you find out the wrinkles such as the dependence of features on each other. Read through any implementation guides/cheat sheets/FAQs associated with the features before implementing them.

(3) The study guide will be up to date with regard to the exam. The exam was rewritten last year but prior to the winter 14 release, as it went through beta in August.

The study guide is your best friend - if you know the areas inside out you will be fine.