The Salesforce Administrator Role is Broken

Francis Pindar
4 min readNov 29, 2022

Yes, I know it may sound hard to hear, but I do believe the Salesforce Administrator role is broken. To understand why you need to rewind to 15+ years ago.

When I started working in Salesforce, we only had two roles, and there were only two Salesforce certifications, the Salesforce Administrator certification and the developer certification. The Administration functionality was relatively limited, and when S-Controls and then Apex was launched, this allowed us to start customising the platform but it was quite heavy code due to the lacking of declarative functionality.

As the platform grew, more and more configuration and declarative functionality came onto the platform, and the admin's role grew. Now we’re in a place where we have gone far beyond the traditional understanding of what an “Admin” is in creating users and reports. An admin can have far-reaching skills in different environments, and looking for a Salesforce role can be very challenging because the Salesforce Administrator role is such a diverse role. But to make things easier when I talk to my students about the Salesforce Administrator role, I show it in a graph.

Complexity vs Size of Company

I use this to demonstrate that the size of the company doesn’t necessarily mean that the Salesforce org is a simple out of the box Salesforce implementation. You could have a very small…

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Francis Pindar

8x #Salesforce MVP & Technical Architect ~ Salesforce Training http://AdminToArchitect.com ~ @SalesforcePosse Podcast ~ Director @LDNsCall