Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer Certification – Lessons Learned

As someone, who had spent the last few years on the SFMC platform, I wanted to give it a shot. Apart from the Trailhead modules, I couldn’t find much information and the subject seemed vast. I relied on my hands-on experience and took the plunge anyway. Was relieved to see the “pass” on the screen!!

As I was reviewing my path to the certification, I think the most difficult part for me was to decide on areas to focus. Someone can easily spend time on areas which may not be relevant for the purpose of passing the certification. These areas can still be used extensively by a software engineer who is working on SFMC.

I wanted to share my experience and lessons learned, hopefully, it helps the next person to prioritize things a bit better than me and not spend too much time on study topics which may not be as relevant!

The exam has the following break up:

1. Data Modelling-14%
2. Programmatic Language – 35%
3. API – 22%
4. Data Mangement – 22%
5. Security -7%

Total questions – 60 Passing Score – 63%

Data Modelling

• Understand the Contact model. How contacts are created across different channels and linked through data designer.
• Contact Deletion process. Consideration for Enterprise 2.0 accounts. The volume of contacts. Time period. How SFMC decided to delete contacts.
• Data retention for Data extension. Data retention for send logs

Programmatic Language

• The exam questions were very basic. Concentrate on the high-level concepts than the complete set of functions.
• Loops, conditions, variable declaration, set values to a variable, commenting, error handling should be the primary focus.
• How AMPScript and SSJS interact with each other
• How to retrieve data from data extensions and write to data extensions. Lookup related data extension function.
• There were no questions from Web Proxy or Guide Template

API

• Get familiar with oAuth2.0.
• How to get client-id and client-secret and use the bearer token in a REST or SOAP call
• Adding contact to a Journey – API endpoints
• Adding data to a data extension -API endpoints – ( I find Postman to be a very useful tool to run API tests)

Data Mangement

• SQL queries – You should break them in smaller parts – timeout value
• Inner vs outer join
• How to query the date views
• SQL functions like IsDate, Convert, Cast. Usage of the Case statement.
• There was a particular question on _click and _sent, which if someone is not familiar with writing queries will not be able to answer.
• My 2cents will be to write a few queries with the data views using the concepts of inner vs outer join.
• Data extraction and File import. Query-based data extract vs tracking extract

Security

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud doesn’t use Shield
• Get familiar with different concepts of encryption at REST
• Field-level encryption

That’s all folks!!

Author: sfdc4ever

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