Salesforce updates Trailhead to help developers showcase skills
Salesforce.com this year has been working to expand its developer ecosystem, in part by gamifying its online learning experience, Trailhead. Now, the CRM giant is helping its "Trailblazers" showcase their hard-earned Salesforce skills to potential employers.
The company on Tuesday unveiled an updated version of Trailhead that makes user profiles more like a digital developer resume. The new profile pages give a more complete picture of what a user has accomplished on Trailhead: In addition to listing "badges" earned, the new pages also include their points earned from Trailhead challenges and the number of "trails" completed. The new pages also include information like a person's job history and their product expertise.
Salesforce is also adding social login capabilities, allow people to sign into Trailhead through Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+.
According to IDC, Salesforce and its ecosystem will create nearly 2 million jobs by 2020, the company notes, and Trailhead is designed to ensure those jobs will be filled.
"There's a skill gap that's been created that we're passionate about closing with Trailhead," Sarah Franklin, Salesforce's SVP of developer relations and GM of Trailhead, told ZDNet. "We want to make it easy and also fun for everybody to learn these skills."
There are more than 3 million people in the Salesforce developer community and around 200,000 active Trailhead users. Since its launch in late 2014, Trailhead users have earned around 1.2 million badges.
Trailhead can help people with technical skills keep pace with Salesforce innovations -- learning skills that they may have otherwise had to pay for or take time off of work to learn. At the same time, Salesforce makes a point of encouraging people from all backgrounds to try out Trailhead.
"It's important to us that we're making the technology accessible to everyone, no matter your background, social status, skill set, age, race, academic background -- you're empowered to learn," Franklin said.