Since I started back with my old company as the Salesforce Practice lead, several firms have contacted me trying to place resources, or I’ve been asked to help “tech” someone applying for jobs at various clients around town.

I recently got passed a resume of someone claiming they’ve had 5 years of experience and carry 5 separate certifications. This person is apparently somewhat local to the area and yet I find no record of this person in any — zero in fact — of the various Salesforce related communities online. Not success, not the stack exchange, not even on twitter or even a blog. In addition, if they’re as local as I’m led to believe, I’ve not seen them at a single user group and not at my dev group either.

While I have no doubt that the person is probably quite capable, I find this extremely alarming. To me it shows zero passion for the platform, zero advocacy. Maybe I’m not being fair, maybe there are extenuating circumstances that I don’t know about, maybe they don’t know these things exist (after five years experience, I find that really hard to swallow).

If I’m given the choice between this person with 5 years experience, and 5 certs but completely unplugged from the community, or someone who maybe has only some of the experience and certs but is regularly attending User Groups, has a success community profile, or stack exchange, and is engaged at all with the community — I’m going to pick the latter.

To me, yes the community is THAT important! Its where the support is at, it’s where you learn the new tidbits and connect with others like yourself and more advanced than yourself, its how you grow. Surrounding yourself with the members of the community I feel is one of the most important things you can do in your Salesforce career and activity within the community is NOT to be overlooked.

If you’re reading this, and wanting to build a career on the platform but you haven’t participated in these channels, it would behoove you to start right away:

Login to the Trailblazer community and create a profile
Visit/browse the Salesforce Stack Exchange Community
Attend a local user (or dev) group, and if you don’t have one, start one! (You can find them listed in the Trailblazer community I linked to above).
Do this, do this now — don’t even finish reading this rant of sorts…

Yes, its THAT important!

:wq!