The Salesforce Administrator Role is Broken

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 Salesforce implementation that is very straightforward in a small company (bottom left of the chart). Still, also you could have a very complex implementation of Salesforce that is using a lot of complex logic in a very large company (top right of the chart). But also, you can have different permutations across different organisations. I’ve worked in tiny, small companies with only 80 users within the org. But the org was incredibly complicated and complex due to all the business rules. I’ve worked on orgs for multinational global companies with 10,000s of users, but the org is relatively simple. So if we take my graph and draw a line from the bottom left to the top right (to keep things simple), a Salesforce Administrator could potentially be working on an org at any point along that line, but the Salesforce Administrator role could be radically different.