Day in the Life: Zainab, from career break to Salesforce Admin

After taking a 5 year career break, Zainab was ready to get back to the grind. She is now 2 x certified with her eyes on her 3rd. Who said you can't be a mum and have it all?

Zainab

  • Course: Salesforce Admin Course
  • Region: EMEA
  • Sector: Information Technology
  • Job Title: Salesforce Admin and QA
  • Works: Lightful
  • Lives: Harrow, England, United Kingdom
Zainab decided to upskill and launch her Salesforce career because..
 

I’m a Computer Science Graduate and worked in IT as an End User Computing Engineer for US based clients for four years. When we started a family, I took time off, and after five years out of the workplace, it was time to kickstart my career again.  

My husband is a Salesforce Consultant and Developer and he introduced me to Salesforce and Trailhead. I actually learned about Supermums through Facebook and had my first call with the Supermums team to learn about the course. 

 

Zainab decided to upskill in Salesforce Admin Course with Supermums because.. 

It was overwhelming at the start as I had a four-year old, a house to run and switching on to learning again was a challenge. Once I started the Supermums course, it got better with every week: the more webinars I attended, the more my knowledge grew.  

The best thing about the course was our weekly webinars and sharing ideas with the cohort group. My cohort had a Whatsapp group where we used to motivate each other every day, and that is how we managed to do our certifications and Trailhead superbadges.  

The most challenging part was the weekly homework and the work experience project. Although it was a short project with a non-profit, there was still lots to learn. I worked with my Project Manager for a brain injury day care centre in Swindon, and we developed the whole Salesforce org from scratch. 

My mentor was so helpful. We had weekly catchups on Zoom, or we would discuss things on email if we weren’t able to catchup. He helped me learn through my mistakes. It really made such a difference! 

 

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

 

Joining Supermums gave my soft skills a boost too, in terms of my communication skills. I got a lot of knowledge form all the other mums who were all from non-technical backgrounds. It makes a lot of different interacting with your cohort members.  

 

I had to explain the gap in my CV to recruiters, and I did have rejections to start with – it was basically imposter syndrome. As I continued my journey, I would relate interview questions to my previous experience. Even if you are changing your field, going from a non-technical field to Salesforce, for example, you can explain how you managed clients or projects and show your efficiency. Personally, my transferable skills were around client interactions and understanding client needs because that is what I did in my full-time job previously.  

 

The admin course is not only technical, but also about agile methodology and business analysis; you learn how to understand those user scenarios, so that was really helpful for me. Those skills are transferable whatever sector you were in before.  

 

Zainab has now successfully achieved a Salesforce career that offers her..  

I work at Lightful, which is based in London, as a Salesforce Admin and QA. I currently work full time remotely from home. 

My work usually starts with stand-up calls for the different projects that I am working on and I try to finish work at 5.30pm so I can have dinner, family time, do some housework or some gardening with the children. 

Working for different projects as I get to learn new Salesforce functionalities. Development and testing on the user stories are both fun and challenging, and once you can do those successfully, you feel like a superstar. 

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