What Does Trailhead Need To Do Next?

Post originally published on the ForceOwl Blog Here.

Last week I published a post that attempted to predict the future of Salesforce hiring. My claim was that Trailhead will overtake Certifications as the standard-bearer for SFDC. This blog post garnered a ton of feedback through tweets, LinkedIn messaging, and direct comments on the post's page - significantly more attention than we expected.

Let's take a moment to mention that I am really bad at predicting the future as is most of humanity.

What I LEFT OUT of that blog post was how Trailhead is going to conquer the Salesforce world. (Maniacal Laugh, Maniacal Laugh).

Anyone know if that was a copyright infringement? I digress . . .

Everyone had opinions on what I was missing, why I was wrong, and what problems stand in the way of my prediction (I know I know, NEVER read the comments section on the internet). So I figured, let's hash some of this out. I see three big possible changes that would push us down the Trailhead dominated path. These are entirely based on supposition and are in no way related to facts or actual information. This is more of my opinion. However, if implemented correctly, I believe they would nudge the Salesforce world closer to my predicted Trailhead dominated future.

CONFIRMING THE IDENTITY OF TRAILHEAD BADGE EARNERS

Certification exams are really good at connecting an individual to the certification. This is an issue Trailhead will need to figure out. Most of the projects on Trailhead require a developer account, but anyone can create one of those. At the moment, identities are hard to verify with those developer accounts.

Unfortunately for you nay-sayers this is one is pretty easy to fix. All Salesforce needs to do is connect developer accounts to an identity verification service. Google "Identity Verification API" and you'll find plenty out there. Trailhead badges just need to be completed with a single developer account and voila. Problem solved.

To keep the on-boarding process frictionless, Salesforce could make the identity verification step voluntary - only those who want to use Trailhead on their resume or LinkedIn need to complete the verification. Everyone who wants to learn can still learn.

AGGREGATED TRAILS AND SUPERBADGES

One of the bigger detractors from Trailhead Badges is the sheer number of them. THERE ARE A TON OF TRAILHEAD BADGES. We ran into this problem when designing Trailhead badges into the ForceOwl app - it is hard to display them all succinctly. (We ended up using Trails, not modules for this reason.) One commenter from last week's post told us they had stopped publishing their completed Badges on LinkedIn - there were just too many to display.

We get it. That's why we want to do away with Badges at the module level. Each Module has it's own Badge. While this level of granularity might be a great way to encourage beginners to do something small and easily digestible to get started, it waters down the value of a single badge.

ForceOwl's suggested solution: let's make modules Mini-Badges or pizza-slice shaped Badge pieces. We would bestow a full Badge only when one completes a full trail. In this model, Badge earning is a bit more rigorous but the badges themselves really mean something special.

Superbadges should require more modules or trails as well. Superbadges require three to four modules the last time I checked. We would love to see this built out with three or more full trails (not modules) instead.

MORE ADVANCED TRAILHEAD CHALLENGES

Let's be honest, some of the Trailhead challenges can be a bit pedestrian. My first experience with this was in the Nonprofit Starter Pack Trail. The content spent a lot of time selling me on how great Salesforce was and the challenges were too easy to complete.

We can't make the challenges too difficult, because it might slow down people's learning. So let's use the opt-in functionality I mentioned above for identification verification. If people want to display the badge on LinkedIn or use in their resume then they have to verify their identity and connect to a specific developer account. When they verify their identity, only then do the challenges appear and they're a bit more tougher than what is running now.

FIN

Oh Trailhead, at the moment you are the apple of my eye, but you are not perfect. But that's the cool thing about Salesforce - they have a motivated team who are continuously iterating on what they've got. Who knows what the next version of Trailhead will look like?

What do you think? What does Trailhead need to do to go "up to eleven"?