Apprentice Hoots: Tips to achieving your first Superbadge

We are extremely proud of Charlotte after successfully achieving her Salesforce Business Administration Specialist Superbadge last week. Learn about the process she went through in our latest Apprentice Hoots blog:

Achieving my Superbadge

Many of you will already know about my journey on Trailhead so far and if you are a regular reader of Apprentice Hoots you will remember that the next challenge I was hoping to tackle was gaining my Salesforce Business Administration Superbadge. AND, I’m here to report that I’ve successfully completed it!

If you have done a Superbadge before you will be aware of the huge amount of text that is required to be digested in order to deliver the project. With this being my first attempt at a Superbadge, I felt slightly daunted by the sheer volume of content, and decided to team up with a fellow apprentice I had been getting on well with via LinkedIn (but not yet met).

I reached out to my peer, Rebecca, who is also studying a Salesforce Apprenticeship, and she was up for the challenge. So together, we developed a plan on when, where and how we could manage the road to achieving our badges and on Friday 10th September, we finally met in person at our offices to get started. For those wanting a useful plan to achieve your next Superbadge, you better get your notepad at the ready! Here’s how we managed the process:

1. Make your playground: Before you can start, you need to create a testing environment for the challenges to be checked. This will hold the key to your success! After setup, don’t forget to install any packages relevant to the Superbadge.
2. Read the content, check it twice: The first step is to read the content, twice – simple! This helps you to get a full understanding and overview of the Superbadge project.This contains all of the requirements that need to be met so it is vital to get this right.
3. Break the content into manageable chunks: Once you have read the content and you feel you have an understanding, it is time to break the content down into digestible chunks. We did this by copying the first challenge into a document and then scanning the project content for relevant information relating to this challenge, copying this into the document also – it helps to take it one challenge at a time.
4. Get to work: Once all of the relevant information for each challenge has been collated, it’s time to start working on the first challenge in the playground. 
5. Check the challenge: You might be lucky and get 500 points straight away but don’t be disheartened if you do get an error pop up. These are usually a simple fix and you can head into your challenge to update before checking once again – taking away your points!
6. Repeat…for the next challenge: Now you have completed the first challenge, it’s time to move onto the next one. Although it may seem like you have to work through multiple challenges, once you’ve made a start, the finish line creeps up extremely fast. Before you know it, you’ve got a shiny new Superbadge to be proud of.

Charlotte’s top tip: Don’t forget, after completing each challenge to high-five your Superbadge partner…if you don’t have one, the person next to you or at least give yourself a pat on the back!

Not only did I gain my FIRST ever Superbadge, I also gained a new friend within the Salesforce Community, and that is one of my favourite things about the Ohana.

Owl see you later… 

Charlotte