How long does it take to learn Salesforce DevOps?

If you’re involved in building on the Salesforce platform, you’ll know that DevOps has become a big deal over the last few years. The days of developing in production are fast disappearing, and simple org-to-org deployments will go the same way. Salesforce teams are joining the wider world of software development and rapidly adopting DevOps best practices.

As a result, almost everyone in the Salesforce community, from admins to architects, is keen to hone their DevOps skills. Even in teams that have a dedicated DevOps engineer, DevOps only works if everyone participates.

If you’re building out your own personal development plan, you’ve probably wondered how long it will take to master Salesforce DevOps best practices. Read on and find out how quickly you can expect to build proficiency in this area.

The benefits of learning DevOps for Salesforce

There are very good reasons to carve out time for skilling up in DevOps, both at an individual and team level.

DevOps helps your career prospects

Salesforce professionals are increasingly expected to have some familiarity with DevOps tools and concepts. More and more job adverts include DevOps as a requirement or nice-to-have. Right now, knowing DevOps helps you to stand out. In time, it will become necessary knowledge for the roles on your career path.

Getting ahead of the curve and learning about DevOps now will mean you can lead the way into more effective delivery on the Salesforce platform. You’ll be even more of an asset to your current and future employers, and proficiency in DevOps will help you secure a higher salary.

DevOps improves your team’s performance

In basic terms, DevOps is about better collaboration and sharing responsibility for the whole development and release cycle. That’s why morale and job satisfaction is better in teams that perform well for DevOps — a finding of Google’s DORA report on the State of DevOps 2023.

DevOps makes you more productive, by reducing the amount of time spent on deployments and debugging — probably not your favorite tasks. As a team, you’ll get more work done with less effort.

Continuous improvement is a key concept in DevOps, which means your team should never be treading water or simply putting up with tedious, error-prone tasks or friction in the process. Instead, you create repeatable workflows that can be automated, freeing you up for the most interesting work.

How to start learning Salesforce DevOps

DevOps encourages continuous learning — making small, incremental improvements to your knowledge and practice. So a suitably “DevOps” way of learning DevOps is to take it a step at a time and never stop learning!

The important thing is that you make a start, reflect on each concept you learn, and try to put it into practice, forming a solid foundation for the next step. As with any technical skills, theory will only get you so far — experience and hands-on learning are essential.

Can you learn DevOps with no previous coding experience?

Yes, you can learn DevOps without previous coding experience. What’s more, in a low-code environment like Salesforce, you can learn DevOps without needing to become an expert in code.

DevOps applies to the declarative development process just as much as code changes, and there are now plenty of tools that provide an intuitive UI for all the processes you need for DevOps: version control, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, backups, and so on.

It’s still beneficial to learn Git commands even if you’re not going to use the command line, so you understand the underlying technology. And if you want to play a key role in the DevOps process for your Salesforce team, it’s well worth getting familiar with Apex so you can help with code reviews, and make educated decisions about testing and code quality.

Read Monica Thornton Hill’s story to find out how she went from being a Salesforce admin to a senior technical consultant, and how DevOps played a central role in her journey.

Useful learning resources for Salesforce DevOps

Salesforce’s own training platform Trailhead would usually be a smart place to head. It’s a great way to learn about declarative and programmatic development on the Salesforce platform. It has some content on topics relevant for DevOps, such as its module on Git and GitHub. But most of the DevOps content on Trailhead is specific to particular Salesforce DevOps tools, rather than teaching you the general concepts you’ll need to master.

There are plenty of other helpful resources from the Salesforce ecosystem. Dan Appleman’s course on Pluralsight, for example, is a great way to learn Apex. Get along to your local Salesforce community events, where you’ll find plenty of people to encourage you along your learning journey. There’s also a growing Salesforce DevOps community that you can join by attending DevOps Dreamin’.

There are a couple of books on Salesforce DevOps worth checking out: Rob Cowell and Lars Malmqvist’s Salesforce DevOps for Architects and Andrew Davis’ Mastering Salesforce DevOps. And anyone will benefit from reading classics like Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps.

DevOps Launchpad is a free training platform, providing courses on all things Salesforce DevOps, so you can learn DevOps concepts and how they apply to Salesforce specifically. You can pick and choose which courses to take and earn certificates along the way. The content is all vendor-neutral, except for the Gearset Academy certification track which guides you through setting up Salesforce DevOps for real.

A learning plan for Salesforce DevOps

There’s no absolute rule, but the following list sets out Salesforce DevOps topics in an order that makes sense for your own learning plan. You could spend a month on each of these four topics, and you’d be pretty proficient by the end of those four months!

• Development and deployments
  • Best practices for deployment success
  • Environment management
  • Types of testing
  • (Optional) Configuration data, e.g. Salesforce CPQ
• Version control
  • Basic Git workflows
  • Git branching strategies
  • Salesforce DX
• CI/CD
  • Continuous integration
  • Continuous delivery vs continuous deployment
  • Test automation
• Data management
  • Sandbox seeding
  • Data backups
  • Archiving

So how long does it take to learn Salesforce DevOps?

Ultimately, it’s up to you. It depends on your starting point, how you go about learning, how much time you can give to it, and what opportunities you have to get hands-on experience in your day-to-day role.

But you can definitely get a handle on core DevOps concepts within a few months, and if you’re able to cement that learning by actually implementing DevOps — even better. The courses on DevOps Launchpad will guide you through different topics, so you can skill up quickly. The Salesforce DevOps Fundamentals certification track is a great place to start. Click below to get started today!