Has anyone done the Supermums Salesforce Course?

[BelBabe]

Quick bit of context. I currently work from home full time as recruiter, on 35k PA, age 34.
I've been looking at a bit of a career change, my job is OK but I'm in rut and can't see any real career progression where I am and to be honest I don't even know if it's a career want to progress.

Have been doing some research and have come across SuperMums, basically you pay around £2000 for a five month course to become a Saleforce administrator and they also provide a lot of career coaching, a job placement and help you get interviews once qualified.

I actually searched Mumsnet for Supermums and found it mentioned on a few threads but would love to find someone who has actually done the course. They make it seem as if as soon as you're qualified you'll work straight in to a fully flexible work from home role on 60k, but I'm really not too sure how realistic that is

I don't think you know what Salesforce certification is. The admin certification that you are aiming to get after your Supermums training is the same wherever you do it. Whether you do it via any training provider - hence my place of study analogy - it isn't a Supermums Salesforce certificate. It is the Salesforce Admin Certification. The one that the vast majority of Salesforce positions require. So whether you study via Supermums for £2k, Udemy for £1k, Trailhead for free or some providers that I saw that were over £3.5k you get the same certification. The difference is how you get there. Supermums is aimed at people that are totally new to tech, so the course has a learning curve to get you from beginner to ready to take your exam and provides a mentor and work experience with charities to get you the knowledge and confidence to take the exam. Udemy and Trailhead can do the same but you probably need more tech experience so that you are used to certain terminology and confident that you don't need someone on the end of an email.

Salesforce is a CRM system, there's two mail ones Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. A Salesforce Admin works in an organisation and can setup and customise Salesforce. All Supermums is, a training provider that can takes you to being a certified Salesforce Administrator, which nearly all Salesforce jobs want you to do. But as well as being an admin you can take other Salesforce certifications and becomes a developer, consultant or business analyst. Salesforce also own Slack and an email marketing tool called Pardot and once you're working in an organisation using Salesforce you can progress and do more certifications. It does a lot and is very hard to describe, I've been using it for a year and still struggle to explain everything it does

Is lesson one how to join a forum slating the training and start posts with "hey" and "hiya" to big it up?

If so I'd suggest a bit more research is needed, that kind of post on here shrieks organised spamming

No you wouldn’t need to necessarily! Hopefully you’d be able to add your salesforce Cert that the Supermums course helped you achieve. Do you get it?

Sales force trailhead is much better!!! It’s free. I’ll send you some links tomorrow

Did AI write this because I still don’t understand what on earth Salesforce or Supermums is, despite the weird, organised MN invasion by those gaslighted into throwing their own money at it.

I’m in the current cohort with Supermums. I totally get why people are leery of it, and it took me almost a year to bite the bullet on it, but I needed something with structure and accountability, and I did plenty of research before I signed up. Salesforce (the company) itself was the most off-putting aspect for me. It took a long chat with a friend who is an “accidental admin” with a charity to convince me that it wasn’t some sort of culty pyramid scheme. I’m still not enamoured with the cartoony “Ohana” thing, but if you separate the culture from the actual tool I don’t think any of that matters all that much.

“More money than sense” is a take I’d argue with. I’m currently working full time for a squeak over minimum wage while looking after an elderly parent (I’m not a mum, super or otherwise), and can’t afford the time or money for a second degree in order to switch careers. I’m under no illusions that I’ll be earning £60k once certified, I don’t think anyone is. What I needed was a potential route out of a career cul-de-sac as someone with a dusty arts degree, a limiting situation at home and an employment history that has been spent entirely in feral small businesses. It’s been great for me so far, the mentor relationship is really helpful, and not something I’d have had otherwise, likewise the work placement, and having a whole cohort of people in similar situations is a real help. I’d have struggled (and probably failed) just using Trailhead on my own in the dead of night after work. Even if the career change is a flop for me, I’ve gained a lot in confidence, and the challenge has been brilliant.

TLDR: Not a scam. Not cheap, but I think it’s been good value for money for my situation. It’s probably not for everyone, and if you have time/focus/confidence/tech experience/corporate background you can probably manage only using Trailhead. A challenging and enjoyable means to an end, as long as you go in with realistic expectations of both the career outcomes, and yourself.

I think this is the biggest issue really. It took a lot of research for me to figure out what Salesforce is and who uses it. If I hadn’t (eventually) realised that I know someone personally who uses it every day in a perfectly normal job that she absolutely loves and then got her to explain it to me I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with it. For such an enormous company that puts so much effort into their corporate culture they really seem to hide what they do!

I still don't understand what you end up doing as a job though? Are you admin or are you selling stuff?

Not that I'm looking to sign up to anything, I'm not planning on changing jobs.

I'm currently doing this course and it's fantastic! I absolutely love the course structure and how supportive the whole Supermums community is.
Yes, you can learn Salesforce by doing your own research and training for free but it was too much of a minefield for me to understand where to start hence I chose this course.
And anyone saying word "Mums" is off-putting in professional working world just highlights the issue that exists when it comes to mums getting back to work after having a child. I'm a mum, I've been made redundant when I was pregnant and now I want to make a start in building my new career.
P.s. no "scam" dedicates this much time to you in order for you to learn a new skill or upgrade your existing ones.

Salesforce is perfectly legit. I suspect the person got laughed at because they put Supermums and not just Salesforce certified admin? That shows her not understanding what it is.

Reading this thread, I suspect most current admins learn via free tutorials on trailhead. It’s like all the coding boot camp posts I see here. I have never met any developers who learned from boot camps. All the languages that got mentioned we learned from reference documents, stack overflow and just doing it. It strikes me as insane paying someone £2k to learn javascript. Doesn’t mean the courses are not legitimate and do not teach you a skill (that you could also learn without training).

What I mean is most of the cure admins with sideways steps probably find it crazy to pay £2k when you can teach yourself and sit the certification exam.

Supermums is non-profit organisation offering heavily discounted courses. Supermums is an Authorised Salesforce Training Provider, and they deliver the courses at a discounted rate from commercial rates.

You can find out more about the different career paths here https://supermums.org/career-options/

Maybe consider the same course through another provider.

It's a bit depressing that some people in hiring positions are laughing at 'supermums'. Casually misogynistic even.

It can be legitimately hard to transition back to the workplace and these women have invested £2K and a lot of time in gaining certification.

I agree it's not the most prestigious name to have on your CV but I'd like to think most people would respect the effort here.

Do you have to put the Supermums reference on your CV? Couldn't you just omit that altogether. The fact that you have the certificate is enough to say surely? Why even mention the provider?

Yeah if you don't know what Salesforce is you probably shouldn't be commenting on this. At least no one's asked what a CRM is yet

No but apologies I wrote this on my phone last night and so loads of typos, AI would've probably been better at explaining it! Essentially Salesforce is the most used CRM in the world.

This is true, I used Trailhead all last summer and got quite far, but as I hadn't used Salesforce before it was very disjointed, which is when I looked for a training provider, researched and found Supermums, it offers mentoring and work experience that was a huge part of why I went with them. I think it depends how you learn, your tech knowledge and platform knowledge. I've worked in Digital Marketing for nearly 25 years using CRMs and have never used Salesforce before and so although I have the tech knowledge I didn't have real world experience of how it all fits together. Part of Supermums is using Trailhead to expand on the weekly training.

I have no clue what CRM is either. I'm commenting because it's completely unclear what salesforce is, what being a supermum means and what you would actually end up doing for £60k a year.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is a software that means businesses can keep track of all the communications sent out to customers. So when you call your energy provider and they say they can see that you called two weeks ago and you've been a customer for 15 years, they're using the CRM to look at your record (information on the system). Nearly every company uses them, and they'll range from a spreadsheet to massive pieces of Software that cover every possible interaction, wherever the customer is or the interaction takes place. Salesforce is an example of the latter. A Salesforce Admin is someone that works in a company that uses Salesforce and is the Administrator of the system. So if anyone has any queries about how to use it, they'll contact the Admin, if they need something adding to it, the Admin will do it. They are essentially the Salesforce expert in the organisation. To get a job as a Salesforce Admin you need to have a particular Salesforce Certification that you get via Salesforce (the company). There are many providers that you can use to train to get this, paid and free, Supermums is one.

Supermums has a good reputation in the salesforce ecosystem so if you were looking for your first role a recruiter would know you had received quality training. Trailheads can be abstract if you come from a position of zero experience with CRMs, Salesforce and business systems which is why Supermums focuses on people who want a career change.

Thank you @Meekafreak - you've been clear where other posts are opaque!

Where are the actual jobs to apply for?