Salesforce recently announced the rollout of myTrailhead as a standalone add-on product for existing Salesforce customers. Salesforce Trailhead was originally designed as a self-learning and education tool for Salesforce users allowing anyone (customer or not) to start learning, earn badges, and work towards Salesforce certifications. Over the years, Salesforce began adding non-Salesforce specific knowledge on to Trailhead including topics like HR diversity/inclusion and EU data privacy laws. Salesforce myTrailhead takes that idea further than ever by extending the highly successful Trailhead learning management platform by allowing customers to add their own firm-specific content.

myTrailhead allows customers to create, manage, and deploy their own tailored, firm-specific education on top of the existing Trailhead platform and knowledge base. While the core focus of Salesforce Trailhead was traditionally focused around educating core Salesforce users (i.e. sales professionals, system administrators, and IT support staff), Salesforce myTrailhead is a general-purpose learning experience tool that can serve several multi-purpose roles for any asset management firm.

Why is Salesforce myTrailhead Such an Important Product Release?

“Business leaders recognize that investing in their people and building a deep culture of learning is a key strategy to moving their company forward.” – Sarah Franklin, EVP of Developer Relations and GM of Trailhead

Employee well-being is now an ever-growing focus of all firms drawing huge amounts of time, attention, and capital across HR. Technology giants lure top prospects with benefits such as onsite gym/laundry, stockpiled snacks in the pantry, and paid meals. The asset management industry is no different with all firms looking for the best ways to spend on employee morale to either differentiate themselves or at least to seem competitive with their peers. Salesforce believes that cultivating a culture of learning is one of the best bang-for-your-buck ways to attract, retain, and engage your workforce, while helping employees gain new, valuable skills along the way.

A study by Josh Bersin discovered that employees who spent five or more hours a week learning achieved the following benefits compared fellow employees that spent an hour or less in similar activities:

• 74% more likely to know where they want to go in their career

• 48% more likely to have found purpose on their work

• 39% more likely to feel productive and successful

• 21% more likely to be happy at work

• 47% less likely to be stressed at work

Create a Culture of Continuous Learning at Your Company Today

Creating a learning management experience for your firm can seem daunting if you are starting from scratch, but there are a ton of areas that should be low-hanging fruit for any asset management firm:

• New Employee Onboarding and Firm Intro Education
• Overview of Key Departments and Product Areas
• What You Need to Know – New Strategy Launch
• Compliance Training and Attestations

These are just some ideas to get some creative juices flowing, but truly the possibilities are endless.

What Makes the Salesforce Trailhead Platform Great?

FinServ Consulting is a Salesforce Partner and we have long recognized Salesforce Trailhead as the platinum standard for vendor-specific learning and education. Salesforce Trailhead launched during Dreamforce 2014 and it was immediately clear that Salesforce created something special: an engaging, non-threatening ecosystem for users of all levels to self-teach and learn valuable new skills.

Key Highlights

• Self-Paced Learning: Trailhead leverages an interactive learning style made popular by educational websites such as Coursera and Khan Academy. The goal is to provide users learning Salesforce with easy access to the information and training that they need at their own pace and schedule. With Salesforce Trailhead, you can learn exactly what you need when you need it by choosing the appropriate set of trails.
• Gamification: Points and badges  are awarded to users on successful completion of units and modules. The points and badges are displayed on each user’s profile, so you can get recognition for your expertise. After achieving certain point and badge totals, users will “level up” to a higher rank. Users start off on the trail as a “Scout” and can progress level-by-level to higher ranks like  “Hiker”, “Mountaineer”, and ultimately “Ranger”.
• Learning Paths: Content is arranged in a hierarchy with three main levels: trails, modules, and units. Material is presented in an ordered sequence, so customers have a predefined learning path to follow without having to spend time on deciding what to read and in what order.
• Modular Learning and Engaging Content: Each tutorial consists of short units the can be reviewed quickly in 10-15 minutes each. The content is designed to be simple, self-contained, and high impact to maximize the value of the time spent in Trailhead.
• Interactive Assessments: At the end of each unit, users will be challenged to verify what that they learned the material, either by answering multiple-choice questions or performing specific tasks in sandbox or playground environment. Feedback is immediate and users can tell how well they mastered any concepts based on how the system scores their responses/activities.

The Bottom Line

Salesforce myTrailhead is a learning experience platform that empowers companies to reinvent how they are approaching learning and enablement. With myTrailhead, you can leverage and extend the power of the base Trailhead platform by incorporating your company’s specific customizations around logos, branding, and specific content. With a skilled hand, users can create and publish engaging, personalized, bite-size content to empower learners to develop new skills, hone existing ones, and showcase their knowledge with badges and points.

Getting started with a learning experience tool like Salesforce myTrailhead can seem daunting, but FinServ Consulting can help you seamlessly plan for and implement these technologies to suit your unique firm needs. FinServ Consulting is a Salesforce Consulting Partner with deep expertise in asset management, systems integration, and strategic consulting. Our guidance ensures that our clients receive the best tailored recommendations for all their Salesforce needs.

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.