Reached the ranks of a Trailhead Ranger

One of my personal goals that I set for myself for 2016 was to become a Trailhead Ranger. Since yesterday evening I’ve reached it.

![Trailhead Ranger](

Learning - the fun way

When I joined Salesforce in May I used Trailhead to start learning about the products and the platform. Some may say that I’m biased - but it’s really THE fun way to learn Salesforce. It’s not like you go through some tech documentation and just read stuff. It’s really about getting introduced to how stuff works by storytelling - and you get challenged to prove what you learned.

Challenges

What I like most is that we have challenges included. That means you have to do real stuff in a test-like environment (called “Developer Edition” or “Trailhead Playground”) which then gets validated by the system to earn your points and badges. That’s really cool! It’s about applying what you learned. So you get validation that you understood everything. Or not. ;-)

I haven’t done Superbadges yet. But they are next on my list. Superbadges are like real-world projects where you get a project description and you’ve to develop the solution on your own. Can’t wait to get my hands (with some spare time) on them.

Gamification

That’s where the Ranger comes into the play. If you achieve a specified amount of badges and points you can get a rank. See here the full list of ranks for reference. Currently the highest achievable rank is the Ranger with 100 badges and 50,000 points. You can find my public Trailhead profile here to check out how it looks like. Also you may see that I’m not a Ranger there… the “why” is explained next.

Drinking our own champagne

We at Salesforce encourage people to learn using Trailhead. So it’s a natural consequence for me doing it too. I believe that you cannot seriously encourage someone to do something if you don’t do it yourself.

Also we use Trailhead internally for learning. That means we have a lot of modules that are only visible to Salesforce employees. Hence the reason why I’m internally a Ranger - but externally not (yet). I’m working on that by doing more badges soon.

Happy learning!