Since the release of the Marketing Cloud Developer certification in May 2019, thousands of people in the Salesforce ecosystem have received their certification — including a large amount of Salesforce partners!

This credential was built for all of you developers that love AMPscript, dynamic content, and APIs, and want to show off your skills. With this new certification, not only do you earn bragging rights, but you also strengthen your image as a Marketing Cloud Subject Matter Expert.

To help you understand the value of this certification — and what to keep in mind along your journey to become a certified developer — I asked four partner superstars who recently acquired their Marketing Cloud Developer certification to share their experience and insights.

Our Marketing Cloud Developer Superstars

Kees Jonk

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant/Developer, Emakina, The Netherlands

Carlos Mora de la Cruz

Marketing Cloud Practice Lead, Atmira, Spain

Dimitrios Markakis

Marketing Technology Capability Lead, Deloitte, Austria

Christiane Smokovicz

Marketing Technology Capability Lead, Excellence, Brazil

What was your experience with Marketing Cloud before this exam?

Kees Jonk: I worked as a Marketing Cloud consultant where I spent most of my time helping clients getting up to speed with their Marketing Cloud Instance and defining and creating service/marketing campaigns. I operated mostly on the business side and less on the development side with Marketing Cloud.

Dimitrios Markakis: Before taking the Marketing Cloud Developer exam, I had 2 years of working experience with Marketing Cloud and the Marketing Cloud Email Specialist and Marketing Cloud Consultant certifications.

Carlos Mora de la Cruz: I work very close to the presales and the discovery stage of a project. I help my clients to concretely define their needs, then I analyze them and propose a way to cover them, searching secure, scalable, and easy to use manners. It is important to bear in mind that we focus on banking, insurance, and real estate, so the security of the data is crucial. Typical use cases could be the definition of a welcome journey (combining different channels, capturing leads for specific financial products, and triggering sends due to transactions.

Christiane Smokovicz: I have been working with Marketing Cloud since 2018, mainly using Automation Studio, Journey Builder, Email Studio, Mobile Studio and CloudPages, in activities such as user training, data model setup, data import and export, audience segmentation, Automations and Journeys, and subscription management.

What was your experience with development before this exam?

CMC: I do not have any programming studies background beyond small courses of a few hours in AMPscript and JavaScript. However, I am not reluctant to learn basic coding! I try to write down pieces of code that have frequent applications. In this way, before preparing the exam, I had consolidated how to make not complex personalized contents of an email, how to make triggered sends by API calls, or how to make simple queries to deduplicate contacts. Additionally, I can handle with Postman, which is essential for testing.

DM: Without having a developer’s background, I found myself in need of some coding skills in order to cover some project’s needs. Of course, many things can be done without coding in Marketing Cloud, but to go the extra mile and deliver a project to my standards, code was needed. As a result, I started learning how to read and write AMPscript from various online sources.

CS: My development experience before the exam is: working on the development of external connections using REST API, SSJS scripts, SQL queries, CloudPages and assets (emails, SMS, Push) with AMPscript, HTML and CSS.

KJ: The only development experience I had was basic AMPscript functionalities and SQL queries that were needed to set up the standard journeys like a welcome, transactional or retention journey. No advanced stuff back then.

What tips would you give to people now preparing for the exam?

DM: Do yourself a favor and take part in João’s Marketing Cloud Developer Fast Path. It is a really valuable learning experience.

CS: Read the questions carefully, some of them present codes, so, the correct form is important. You should study for each topic that this exam covers, available in the exam guide, dig deep in the documentation for each one of them, and gain some experience and do some hands-on work with AMPscript, SSJS, SOAP API, Rest API. And most importantly, believe in yourself and in your skills!

CMC: In my case, what really worked well is that, with two other members of my team, we created a mini squad to prepare the exam. Sharing highlight learnings and helping each other in things we could not understand after trying individually for some hours was some of the squad’s main goals. Probably the most valuable initiative of the squad was conducting small transfer sessions to consolidate knowledge. You can not say you have learned something correctly until you can teach others about it.

KJ: Always practice and test your new obtained knowledge on an SFMC instance. Also, try to come up with use cases on how a specific (development) functionality would be used in a real-life situation in one of your SFMC projects.

This helps you to look at a functionality/use-case from multiple perspectives.

What resources did you find valuable to study?

CS: There were several resources that I used to study, such as:

• The Marketing Cloud Developer Fast Path webinar that covered all topics of the exam.
• The documentation that is available on the Salesforce Developer’s page.
• And the material made available by Marketing Cloud Experts: Eliot Harper, Zuzanna Jarczynska, and Adam Spriggs.

KJ: I attended a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer Certification Fast Path Training that helped me to understand the most important topics of the exam. During this training, all topics are being explained by a Marketing Cloud trainer and the group can ask questions about the topics that eventually lead to interesting discussions on the SFMC topics.

Besides that, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer Center is THE place to go to get SFMC development specific insights about development related topics.

CMC: Before taking the exam, I carefully read the official study guide and made my own checklist of topics. After that, I tried to cover all of them in the long term. As I am quite busy, I tried to study in short periods but constantly in time. One of the first things I did was completing the Develop for Marketing Cloud trail, which is not a deep approximation but gives you a general idea. I also attended a Marketing Cloud Developer Fast Path course in Madrid, where you get very specific tips for the exam.

DM: Apart from the Fast Path, Trailhead provides valuable information about the exam and some useful modules to get an idea and a general feeling of what the exam will entail.

How did you benefit from taking this exam?

CMC: I am very proud to earn my Marketing Cloud Developer Certification. One of the most important things for me about it is that I can present strong credentials on my proposals when it comes to concerns about cloud marketing development. I can feel that customers are taking it into consideration. On the other hand, thanks to studying the exam, I can feel that I have more confidence when I face problems in development, just to give some examples, now I can quickly recognize API error codes, encode in AMPscript faster, secure API calls or even make some workaround using SSJS. It was certainly a valuable effort.

KJ: It offered me more and better insights on how to use SFMC to its full potential. In discussions with a client or with fellow developers I feel more comfortable in providing solutions in a best practice way. As a specialist, you want to know everything there is to know about your specialism. And because SFMC is a pretty big and powerful monster, it’s necessary to invest as much as time possible in these kinds of certifications to make sure you can control this beast.

DM: By learning for this exam, I got broader knowledge on Marketing Cloud and on possible challenges that I might face during a project as well as on how to face those challenges. Now I feel comfortable delivering a platform where users can effortlessly create personalized and dynamic marketing channels such as email, SMS, and landing pages.

CS: Earning this certification certifies me as a professional who, using programming methods with Marketing Cloud Studios, promotes solutions to meet clients’ business objectives and, together, we are successful in our operations.

Ready to take the Marketing Cloud Developer certification?

If you already have the Email Specialist certification, you can register for the exam on Webassessor. But before you do that, have a look at the certification page on Trailhead. If you need some help preparing for the certification, and you have access to the Partner Community, you can also have a look at the Marketing Cloud Developer Fast Path in Partner Learning Camp.