Tips for the Salesforce Platform Developer 2 Certification

When I was studying for the Salesforce Platform Developer II exam, I looked for information about what kind of things I could study (besides what the official guide says), or maybe some tips to keep in mind for the day of the exam. I only found a few blogs talking about this certification back then, so now that I’ve passed the exam I thought that maybe I have some information that someone may find useful.

1. Do the superbadges before the exam

This may sound like a useless tip to some of you, but when I was studying, I thought that I had enough knowledge about all the subjects in the superbadges, so I could just do the exam first and then focus on them.

Wrong!

Salesforce have prepared this superbadges really well, and they touch a lot of subjects that are really important for the exam. You may have not seen every type of integration and only know the theory part about them, or maybe you haven’t developed as much lightning components as you want.. whatever is the thing that you think you have less experience on, there are four superbadges that will get you ready on all these necessary topics.

So if you are like me and think that you should do the multiple choice exam first, please think one more time about it, because if you do the projects, you will have more confidence in yourself.

Also, if you do the projects first, you will receive the certification from Salesforce right after the multiple choice exam, which is not the case if you do it the other way.

2. FocusOnForce can give you practice questions for the exam

FocusOnForce has helped me a lot in other certifications like Administrator or App Builder. It’s a paid platform (only 20$) where you get a set of questions for a given certification, and not only they do simulation of exams for you, they also give you an explanation about why an answer is correct, which is really useful when you fail one.

It’s interesting to train in there, but in this precise certification I found the questions to be a bit outdated. They barely have any question about Aura components (as of August 2019), and I had a bunch of them in my official exam.

Don’t expect any of those questions to appear on your exam, as they are only for practice purposes.

3. Study about Lightning Web Components (LWC) if you haven’t

LWC was pretty new stuff when I took the exam, and even then one or two questions appeared in my test. So if you haven’t looked into it much, maybe you should if you want to avoid any surprises.

Lightning Web Components Trailmix

4. Memorize the saving order of execution

The order of execution is really important and Salesforce wants you to know about it to improve your development solutions and avoid future problems. There were a handful of questions about this topic, so maybe memorizing the order and writing it in the additional paper they give you in the exam will be useful, because if a question related to it appears in your test, you just have to look at the notes you wrote, without nerves interfering in your thinking and myabe making you think you’re wrong.

5. Conclusions

This certification is not one that people will get just studying the content of the official trailmix, to get this cert you need to have experience in Salesforce development. If you already have, you can pass the exam without a lot of trouble.

If you are not sure to know all the things necessary to pass the test, I would recommend you to start with the superbadges now, as they will give you a lot of knowledge and confidence for the exam.

Good luck to you all!