I've never really spent time understanding the Salesforce career paths
so while I've always described myself as a Salesforce Administrator, I realized recently that wait a minute..I think I'm also an architect, designer, and analyst?
I have the opportunity to change my title to be a better fit for my job. I work for a social services nonprofit and my title is is currently Director of Research & Evaluation. My job is to do everything related to recording information on clients and services (except actual data entry) which we primarily keep in Salesforce (with a goal of being almost exclusively in Salesforce in the long run). The way I describe it is it's half reporting and half Salesforce Administration. But what I've been calling "Salesforce administration" is actually
- talking to teams and gathering requirements,
- designing and building on the data model to support those requirements,
- designing and building out the interfaces for the different teams interacting with the data,
- putting together automations to make the user experience more streamlined,
- defining and setting up data governance policies, and
- analyzing the data to get outputs and outcomes to report to funders
I've dabbled in development and will probably grow into that at some point but right now that's not really a part of it. Also note that everything related to IT security and hardware setups, etc is all stuff I rely on IT for. I just say "this needs to be HIPAA compliant" and they tell me what my options are and implement what we agree on so that I can continue to advise staff on exactly what data can be shared and how.
I would like a title that both reflects my current role and sets me up for the job I want the next time I decide to make a change. I get bored with repetitive reporting but I love almost everything about the lifecycle of requirements gathering to design, implementation, testing and feedback, and continuous improvements. Given that I would prefer to deemphasize the evaluation piece in favor of more of the fun Salesforce stuff.
Director of Data Systems? Director of Data Solutions? Data Architect & Analyst? Evaluation Director and Salesforce Architect? Director of Data & Compliance?
Happy to hear any ideas!
#CareerDevelopment #Solution Architects
Interesting, I assumed "consultant" referred to people hired outside of a company to support staff within a company, but is it a title more related to the breadth of skills than it is to you role within the company?
Part of why I'm struggling is because I am worried about my title being too Salesforce-specific because my role would exist even if Salesforce hypothetically went away, it just happens to be the system we use. Basically if it's anything related to data I'm your girl. But I've completely drank all the Salesforce Kool-Aid and kind of love working with it so I like the idea of being well positioned for another job where I could be really involved in Salesforce solutions.
Forgive me if everyone know this, but just in case, FYI: evaluation is the field specifically referring to looking at nonprofit program efficacy through a data lens and that is why that's in the title. Maybe it should stay in there somewhere since it gets to the root of why we look at data for anything other than short-term reference to client files.
