Since I had passed the MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions) stage of the Advanced Developer 501 certification exam (now discontinued), I became eligible to take the Platform Developer I Transition exam. Please note that passing the MCQ Stage of DEV 501 is a pre-requisite for you to be able to register for this transition exam. Being a sucker for Salesforce certifications, I decided to take a stab at this one too. Without putting in a lot of effort into typing out what you need to know before taking this exam, I will simply quote Salesforce’s study guide for this exam:
The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I credential is intended for individuals who have knowledge, skills, and experience building custom applications on the Force.com platform. The program covers the breadth of application development on the Force.com platform, including the declarative and programmatic capabilities of Apex and Visualforce. The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I credential encompasses the fundamental programmatic capabilities of the Force.com platform to develop custom business logic and interfaces to extend Salesforce using Apex and Visualforce. To achieve this credential, a candidate must successfully pass the exam. This exam is a prerequisite to the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II exam.
Speaking from personal experience, if you have at least 6-8 months of experience working with Apex, Visualforce and Lightning Components , this exam shouldn’t be a tough nut to crack. You get 15 Multiple Choice questions, 30 minutes to complete the exam with the passing score being at 73% which means that if you manage to get even 11 questions right, you are through. Being a non proctored online exam means that you do not need to go to a testing location or schedule a date which makes our life so much easier.
In order to pass the exam, I would recommend being well-versed with the following topics:
- Order of Execution
- Running Tests in Developer Console
- Lightning Components
- Code output questions
- Apex collection types
- Apex Triggers and bulk data loading with Apex Data Loader
- Governor Limits
- Deciding which automation tool best serves a requirement – Appexchange app or Process Builder or Visual Workflow etc.
- Apex Declaration Types
- Schema Builder
- Changing Field type
- Querying metadata
If you are comfortable around the above topics, I am sure you can easily pass this exam. So what are you waiting for? Register, launch and add one more certification to your career profile!
Good luck.
