Advance Your Skills with Data 360
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Learn about Data 360 and the associated learning journey.
- Identify helpful skills for the advanced Data 360 user.
- Preview content and features found in the advanced Data 360 milestone.
Before You Start
This badge is part of the Data 360: Develop and Build Solutions trail. The trail expands your skills by introducing advanced features, developer tools, and end-to-end solutions by using Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud). In this badge, you get an overview of how to expand your skills and prepare for advanced functionality.
The Data 360 Journey
The Data 360 journey is straightforward: Connect your data, map it to a model, unify your data, and then act upon it based on your business use case. But understanding how Data 360 works, is just one part of the equation. It also requires someone with the skills and experience to effectively wield its power. Additionally, due to rapidly evolving technology surrounding data and its impact on AI, it’s not just about data anymore—it’s about metadata, semantics, context, memory, and more.
So far in the Data 360 learning journey, you covered business scenarios, benefits, and core functionality of Data 360. In this final level, you dive into advanced functionality, developer tools, and building end-to-end solutions across Salesforce. But what advanced skills do you need to be successful?
Expand Your Skills
Data 360 users require more skills than just understanding data, they must understand Salesforce functionality, Data 360 specific functionality, and increasingly, LLM-parsing or chunking strategies to improve LLM performance. Whether your day job is a data scientist, architect, admin, consultant, or marketer, you now also have the responsibilities of both a chief data officer and a chief AI officer.
Data 360 users increasingly need to understand the following concepts to be effective stewards of your company’s data and, therefore, associated agents.
- Data model structure and concepts
- Data lineage and data hygiene
- Ontology and metadata
- Semantic layers and context
- Governance and tagging
- Query development and optimization
- Development with data kits and sandboxes
- Large language models (LLMs) and predictive and generative AI
- Chunking strategies for search indexes and RAG
- Prompt development and testing frameworks
- Architecture dependencies and troubleshooting
In addition to what you learn in the Data 360 learning path, Trailhead offers additional training in many of these areas including a trail to Build Your Data Literacy and the unique Agentblazer program where you can become an Agentblazer Legend!
Advanced Data 360 Content
The content in this milestone helps you build your skills across Data 360. From expanding your transformations, building more efficient queries, to creating more advanced segments, there are many ways you can improve performance, optimize credit usage, and fine-tune Data 360 functionality. Let’s preview some of these areas.
Architecture Guidance
Understanding the pros and cons of early architecture decisions, data spaces, proper org setup, and interoperability can make a big impact on reducing the time to value with Data 360. If you have one Salesforce org, architecture decisions are fairly straightforward. Add in multiple orgs with hundreds of data sources, bidirectional connections, and complex security requirements, and your Data 360 architecture can get complex quickly. To be compliant on governance requirements, it requires a thorough understanding of data segregation, access control of metadata, and downstream impacts of restricting certain access.
Improve Data, Improve Results
You’ve probably heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” when it comes to data. If you improve the data—even better, the context around the data—all results improve, whether you’re wanting to improve marketing audiences or improve agent responses. Expand your knowledge by exploring data transforms, Informatica data hygiene capabilities, building a semantic layer, or reviewing chunking strategies.
Expand Functionality
Users can explore advanced segmentation to help you fine-tune your audiences to make smarter ad audiences. Or you can expand your proficiency with search indexes and content processing tools like Intelligent Context or Document AI.
Optimize Performance
Another key area for users to explore is in the use of Data Graphs and Query Builder to optimize your queries and save time in testing. For most Data 360 users, credit consumption and tracking credit usage is top of mind. By expanding your querying skills, you can directly impact query performance and reduce credit consumption. Imagine the benefit of telling your boss at your annual performance review that you reduced credit consumption by x%!
Data-Driven Automation
Streamlining processes and automating tasks ensures that the platform remains robust without constant manual intervention. Beyond individual tools, mastering advanced data skills acts as a catalyst for organizational efficiency by transforming Data 360 into an outcome-focused context engine. What data is needed for your process automations? What data is needed to reduce manual configurations and move to automated, intelligent workflows?
What’s Next?
By furthering your understanding of Data 360 advanced skills like improving data hygiene, optimization tools, and building context, you become immensely marketable in an AI-first market. In this trail you learn about various advanced features, but as tools and features expand, come back and revisit this trail to see what’s new. After taking this trail, you might also be interested in completing the Data 360 Consultant Certification to show the world your Data 360 prowess. Take a look at the companion trail to check any gaps in your Data 360 knowledge. In the short term, continue level 3 and complete the Batch Transforms badge to improve the quality of your data.