Welcome to the fifth of my Salesforce Career Success Journey series. This series is focused on learning and sharing our career journey and hopefully encouraging others to pursue or continue their career on the Salesforce.com platform. Today, we have Atul Gupta who transitioned from one of the big 4 to starting his own implementation firm! Although I haven’t met Atul in person, I’m positive from our correspondences that he’s one FUNNY guy! Thanks for sharing your journey!
If you would like to share your Salesforce Career Success journey, submit here.
Name: Atul Gupta
Company: CloudVandana
Job Title: Founder, Salesforce Consultant/Developer
Which Salesforce certifications do you have?
Salesforce Certified Administrator
Salesforce Certified Force.com Developer
Salesforce Certified Advanced Developer (Both Stages Cleared)
Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant
Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
How many Trailhead badges do you currently have?
25
Describe what you do at your company.
I am the founder and Salesforce Developer/Consultant at my company CloudVandana (cloudvandana.com).
Why did you start your own firm if you had a stable job at Accenture? Do you have any lessons learned starting your own company?
To find more challenging work for myself. I think I can contribute and produce a lot more, take up more things and deliver them if I’m working for myself. It’s just the start and I’m actually figuring out a lot of things. Will definitely comment on the lessons learned when I’ve accumulated some pretty good ones and am at a level to give out advice in running a successful company for a period of time. Right now it’s the start.
Give us a snapshot of how you got your salesforce career started and/or how your career has developed.
After completing my graduation in Bachelor of Technology. I got a job with Accenture Services Pvt. Ltd in Bangalore. There I was first introduced to Salesforce. They told me that it’s drag and drop and click here and there and you are done. I thought that sounded easy and took it up 😛
At that time, I was not given a choice as well to chose my technology, hence I went with Salesforce. During that time, I didn’t have realize the awesome opportunity to work on a wonderful platform like Salesforce.
The first few months weren’t that eventful, but eventually I developed a deep curiosity and interest in Salesforce, there was no looking back.
In Accenture, I got awesome opportunities to attend Salesforce Certification Trainings and then my Certification streak began.
In 3 years, I had become a:
- Salesforce Certified Developer
- Salesforce Certified Administrator
- Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant
- Salesforce Certified Advanced Developer (MCQ + Assignment)
and got 2 promotions.
Then I decided to get deeper into Salesforce and started with my blog (www.cloudvandana.com). It was earlier called forcejunky.blogspot.com but later I switched to wordpress platform with domain name cloudvandana. Now I am giving out Salesforce services as a freelancer and as a company with the name CloudVandana. So far so good.
[Annie: Congratulations of being a 5x certified!]
Can you explain what graduating in technology means?
So in Graduation, I studied programming languages like JAVA and concepts like OOPS. But I wasn’t a geek if you want to ask that 😛
I did put in a lot of hard work after I started my job and learned a lot of things. Still learning everyday, continuously, trying to keep myself updated with the loads of things that are happening in the Salesforce world. It’s like drinking through a hose pipe, there is so much to learn and understand out there.
What advice would you give to someone who is developing their career on salesforce?
1) Jump into Salesforce and learn the platform inside out. I don’t think there is any technology right now that is as easy to learn as Salesforce and this is because of the awesome ecosystem and resources that are available out there to learn Salesforce, it’s just awesome.
2) You have official resources like Salesforce Help and Trailhead.
3) You have plenty of awesome blogs and tutorials posted by Salesforce MVPs and other bloggers. To name a few
http://www.jitendrazaa.com/blog/ by Jitendar Zaa
http://www.salesforceben.com/ by Ben McCarthy
http://www.nesensa.com/ by Oliver Hansen
http://womencodeheroes.com/ by Kieren Jameson
There is a thriving and I think the easiest to reach out to, Salesforce community out there. You can contribute and learn via multiple channels. You can do so on Twitter (#askforce), Success Community, Developer Community, Salesforce Stackexchange, Developer User Groups and if you are little Old School you can check out Salesforce IRC Channels here and here.
All of this can help you learn Salesforce and make it as your career choice, a fun experience. The Salesforce ecosystem is continuously expanding and there is no dearth of jobs. If you get down to learning Salesforce, getting the right certifications and contributing back to the Community, you can find yourself in a pretty awesome spot in a couple of years.
Are you a leader or member of a user group?
I just got a leadership position for New Delhi Developer User Group and will be reviving this group with a new meetup pretty soon. I am also a member of Gurgaon Developer User Group headed by Shivanath Devinarayan.
Please name 1 person from the Salesforce community that you’d like to thank for supporting you on your journey.
There a number of people who have been my inspiration and support.
If I mention a few public figures in Salesforce then, Jeff Douglas has been one of the people whose blogs have been a great source of information and inspiration. Now I see a lot of bloggers in Salesforce, but back in the days I used to swear by his blogs. There are a lot of concepts in Salesforce I got introduced to via his blogs. I would really like someday to meet him and thank him for his awesome contributions.
What’s the one Success Community group you can’t live without?
Answers Community
ButtonClick Admins
Follow Atul on:
Twitter: atul31gupta
LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/atul31gupta
Website: www.cloudvandana.com
Skype : atul31gupta
Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/atul31gupta/
AnnieForce 