Day in the Life: Erika, from stay at home mum to Salesforce Developer in 18 months

After having a career break to raise her family Erika knew she wanted to go back to work in the digital transformation space and the Salesforce ecosystem was the perfect fit due its equality, diversity and support of women. Now all she needed to do was learn Salesforce!

Erika

  • Course: Salesforce Admin Course
  • Region: EMEA
  • Sector: Marketing
  • Job Title: Associate Salesforce Developer
  • Works: Deutsche Bank
  • Lives: London, England, United Kindom
Erika decided to upskill and launch her Salesforce career because.. 
 

I was a stay-at-home mother for four years, and before that I worked on digital transformations programs. I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my life when I went back to work, and I knew it was going to be something digital because that’s where the future was. I tried to find something on the ‘how’ to be digital.  

I had used Salesforce as an end-user and they are so good with equality for women; that is one of the main reasons I wanted to work with Salesforce.  

 

Erika decided to upskill in Salesforce Admin Course and PD1 Course with Supermums because.. 

The mentor was one of the reasons I signed up to Supermums, otherwise I would have been scared to fail. My mentor was based in Sweden but was a French speaker like me. He was there every week for our call, and it was important for me because I built my homework around our discussions.  The mentors instantly know what’s wrong, which step you’ve missed. Supermums are very good at putting you in the position of a consultant: they don’t give you all the answers – just enough for you to know what to do.   

For my work experience project, I worked with a French agency but everyone was international, so we were all working remotely. It was a brand-new implementation which was great because it used all the knowledge we built with the homework, which made you feel comfortable to go into a new project.  

 

After the course, I was going for Admin role interviews and they all asked me if I’d be willing to code. I thought that I might as well learn how to code now, so I signed up for the PD1 course.  I wasn’t too scared; I think it’s logic. Even if you face a lot of bugs, it’s a language and I speak three languages already so I thought I can learn to speak another to communicate with a computer. 

 

Erika was able to launch her new Salesforce career successfully because…. 

With the work experience project, you learn new things because the client wants things in a certain way, but you just consolidate all your knowledge from the Supermums course and that makes you really comfortable and confident to go later for interviews because you can say ‘I know Salesforce, I know how to do this and that, I’ve done it for a client and the team was happy with my work, so it doesn’t matter if it was only a three month course, I’m actually really capable’. That is a unique selling point of Supermums.  

 

If it wasn’t for the Supermums community and the Salesforce community, I think I might have potentially said ‘maybe I’m not made for this’, but with the community, you realise it is possible and it’s easier than we think. We just have to be confident, be resilient and reach out and say ‘I don’t understand this, who can help me’, and then you’ll see the answer was so simple. 

 

Erika has now successfully achieved a Salesforce career that offers her…  

I work as a Salesforce Developer for Deutsche Bank.  My typical day will start with a team meeting where we discuss the previous day, the blockers, and the strategy for the upcoming day.  After that, we will be working together to find solutions. Every two weeks we deliver something, so we have to prepare a show and tell for the users. 

I do not spend my whole day in front of the computer coding – it’s 25% meetings, 50% coding and 25% researching.  

Are you looking for a change?

We’ve helped over 400 trainees find flexible, well paid roles in the Salesforce ecosystem, just like Erika. Have a look at the different Salesforce courses we offer, we’re sure there is one that’s right for you.

See our other case studies:

What our Alumni have to say:

Shopping Basket