How can low-code accelerate your Salesforce career?

It’s no secret that there’s a worldwide shortage of software developers. We’ve increasingly come to shop, bank, work, and play online: an effective online presence has become essential for the majority of businesses. This has accelerated in recent years, as more companies work and serve their customers online.

So, if you’re looking to build your Salesforce career, it’s a good idea to have some developer skills to help you along the way.

Low-code to the rescue

The good news is that even if you’re not currently a developer, there’s still an opportunity to get involved through low-code. In the IT industry, low-coding is sometimes called ‘declarative coding’ or a ‘declarative language’ (although some declarative languages such as SQL are not strictly menu-driven). Low-code makes declarative coding even more simple by using drag-and-drop menus and tick boxes.

Declarative user interfaces are often built on top of a procedural language (such as C++, Perl or Cobol). The key difference is that procedural coding allows you to describe both what the code will do and how it will do it, whereas declarative language can only describe what the code will do.

Salesforce uses a programmatic language called Apex. When developing in Salesforce, you’ll occasionally need to use Apex for something entirely new or custom built, but the majority of coding can be done without Apex by using a bunch of user-friendly menus.

Anyone currently working as an Admin or in another non-developer Salesforce role will find low-coding relatively easy to learn, so now is a good time to upskill and take advantage of a hungry developer market.

Low-coding is 'proper' development

Concerned that low-coding isn’t ‘proper’ development? Don’t worry! It can still pave the way to learn a great deal about development — and you could even gain skills to start you on a journey to becoming a programmatic developer, if that catches your interest.

Low-code knowledge opens career development doors

Still need to be convinced to embrace low-code? Keep in mind that even a small amount of coding knowledge could take you into Salesforce design, business analysis, product development, testing, or technical architecture — opening up a whole range of career opportunities.

With low-code, you can start to learn the whole software development lifecycle and set yourself on the road to a fulfilling career in development. You’ll also gain essential knowledge of key areas such as source control, continuous integration and development (CI/CD), change monitoring, and backups — skills that are becoming increasingly important as more companies adopt DevOps practices.

Boost your low-code skills

As Kevin Boyle, the CEO of Gearset, points out in his article Low code shouldn't mean low engineering, robust engineering principles still apply whether you’re using low-code or coding with Apex. So it’s important to learn best practices for development and releases from the get go.

To kick start your low-code practice, check out our free certifications on DevOps Launchpad. You can learn how the low-code mindset is applied to core DevOps principles, including version control, Git branching strategies, CI/CD, and much more. Sign up today!