Ever since I started working with Salesforce, Trailhead has been my go-to place for learning new things and understanding key ideas about how Salesforce works. As a result, when our Head of IT asked if I could come up with a training solution for our employees, my first thought was to use Trailhead.

My initial plan was to get to a single org that all my employees could log into and complete the trailhead challenges that I selected for them. Unfortunately, Salesforce does not enable such an org and requires that each user have their own developer account in order to complete the trails.

I decided to find a way around this, that would allow me to track my employees progress while also allowing me to use the material designed by Trailhead (and not have to reinvent the wheel).

My solution was a three-step process –

First, I created a spin-off org of our Production environment, so that when it came time to doing the activities I would not have to worry about something going wrong.

Second, I scoured through Trailhead to find exactly which pieces were relevant for my employees. Once I had compiled a list of links (modules, trails, topics etc.), I began to work out on how my users would complete them. I did so by going through each link and checking out the challenge at the end. I then came up with an alternative version that would be easily trackable within a training org. An example of such could be that when the challenge said to create a new account with XYZ as the name, I wrote out instructions to use their own name for the account.

Finally, I cleaned it all up and put into a document that could be shared anytime we had someone new join and needed to catch up on the 101 how-to’s of Salesforce. I also gave the suggestion, that if the user was interested enough, they could in fact sign up for their own developer org and complete the challenges there.

Overall, my users have found this process to be super helpful and a great way to get their feet wet in Salesforce.

For reference, here are the links that I found helpful:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/lex_salesforce_basics/lex_salesforce_basics_welcome

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/module/admin_intro_crm_basics

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/admin_intro_accounts_contacts/admin_intro_accounts_contacts_basics

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/lex_salesforce_tour/lex_salesforce_tour_more