Explore how Brights effectively tackles the growing skill gap and learn about the transformative impact of Salesforce reskilling through one of its alumni’s professional journeys.
Evolving job market
“We can see that the need for junior IT profiles has decreased while at the same time, more junior profiles are available on the market”, says Philipp Leipold, Managing Director Germany & Switzerland at Brights Learning.
“However, in Germany for example, we are talking about 149,000 people missing in IT, and the need will become even more pressing when more and more senior personnel are exiting the workforce. In addition, IT companies are reacting differently to the macro-and micro-economic situation”, he says. “Some are laying off workers including key senior IT employees; some are focusing on increasing the proportion of outsourcing, while others are insourcing again.”
Based on the newest IDC study, the fast-growing Salesforce economy will also increase the demand for IT jobs worldwide with an estimated net gain of more than 11 million jobs between 2022 and 2028 … and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating this growth.
AI’s impact on job profiles
As highlighted in the latest McKinsey report, a significant number of jobs will undergo substantial changes in the coming years due to AI, leading to the emergence of new skill profiles that are currently unknown. The big majority of our entire workforce will be affected by AI very soon, so we need to act now. Customised skilling solutions, such as our Salesforce training, can be a proven part of the solution.
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Unlocking potential with Salesforce training
Brights’ focus on Salesforce training offerings has several reasons.
Philipp says: “First of all, the Salesforce economy is continuously growing and is gaining market share. As Salesforce is not part of most academic and secondary education, we are seeing a huge potential to reskill new talents with our hire-train-deploy concepts. At the same time, we see an increased demand for our skilling initiatives among Salesforce customers and partners for seasoned Salesforce specialists and existing employees who are new to the Salesforce ecosystem. Our focus on training new talents and re/upskilling employee shifters has a positive impact on our clients when building their Salesforce teams. It not only leads to an increase in creativity in the team but also to higher work satisfaction. Combining measures of reskilling new talent with skilling existing personnel is where true magic happens!”
Phillip further stated, “We still see a too prominent focus on formal requirements in recruitment, and hesitation of hiring diverse candidates, especially around career-shifters.”
Alex is one of the career-shifters who found his way into the Salesforce ecosystem through the reskilling initiatives from Brights. Coming from business psychology, he always had a great interest in technical topics, which led to his change in career in 2020. He is now working as Salesforce Senior Consultant and Project Manager.
Embarking on a Salesforce journey
“When I was still working in marketing and researching email marketing, I came across Trailhead. This was the first time I saw broad opportunities within the ecosystem. My interest in Salesforce skills was aroused and just a couple of days later, a Brights’ ad crossed my path and I directly applied for one of their training courses.
Alex especially liked the protected environment of the training, in which the trainees supported each other during their learning journey, guided by the course instructor. “Salesforce is one thing above all: a craft. And every craft needs to be practised in order to master it. That’s why it was exactly right and important that, in addition to theoretical units, we above all had the opportunity to discover Salesforce ourselves, solve use cases, make mistakes and learn and grow from our mistakes as a group.”
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Essential skills for success
“For my role, I’d say you need a mix of two things: On the one hand, the core of my job as a Salesforce expert involves solving technically demanding tasks, mapping business processes in Salesforce and generally configuring Salesforce for my customers. On the other hand, as a consultant, I am there for my customers to understand their needs and sometimes to help them understand themselves, to pick them up exactly where they are. This includes a lot of things like discovery calls, process analysis, requirements analysis, presentations of any kind, training and much more.”
For Alex, soft skills are at least as important as sound technical skills. “As a Salesforce Consultant, you always work very closely with people, which in my opinion is also a major difference to the developer profession. In my opinion, soft skills such as active listening, presentation skills and didactics are must-haves to be a good consultant.”
Last but not least, Alex was also nominated to share his impressive career change during the Trailblazer keynote at one of our (if not the) biggest events in Germany, World Tour Munich: “It was an amazing experience that I am very grateful for. Of course, the idea of speaking in front of 2500+ people was very exciting, not to say scary, but at the same time it was insanely great to be on such a big stage, next to such great people and to be able to share my experiences.”
Brights’ future is bright!
“We have been an officially accredited Salesforce Workforce Development Partner for multiple years in Germany. We intend to intensify this partnership even more and combine it with our strategic partnership with AWS. Moreover, we are now working on certifying our Salesforce standard curriculum so that our partnering companies can get up to 100% of the training and salary costs subsidised by the German government (AZAV).”
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About Brights
Philip Leipold is the Managing Director at Brights Learning for Germany & Switzerland. Brights has been an international training consultancy since 2015. Starting out with primarily recruiting, training, and staffing career-shifters as a means of winning new talent, they have now also established themselves as the leading provider of customised up- and re-skilling solutions in seven countries in Europe. Brights not only has over 200+ alumni from 15 programs, of which most are still working within the Salesforce ecosystem, but their training offerings have also led to over 600 Salesforce Admin certifications.
