In Salesforce, there are two major roles, one is Admin and the other one is Developer, everyone will tell you that you should learn how to be an Admin first, then learn to be a Developer. I totally agree, with your Admin skills, you will understand the whole picture a lot better; since as an Admin, you are the heart of your Org.
A lot of people will have some misunderstandings about Admins in Salesforce. People would think as an Admin, you are only in charge of user access problems, but that’s not all. Of course, we want to control on security, but the same time, we are also helping with development that’s not involving coding as well, like creating a field that end user want to see, creating reports for managers, sometimes they need us to clean up data. As an admin, you are not only thinking about how can we solve the problem, you are also learning what we can do to make this process to be easier for the users and how can we help them out in the long term. Even though I love programming, but as much as I learned about being an Admin, I can tell why Salesforce Admin is so important now. Admins know about the system really well, they understand what would be the most efficient way to solve problems for the users, and they work with users closely in order to provide the best solution. From those perspectives, I really love about Admins. Being a good Admin is the first step in order to be a great developer.
Resources Link to heading
Trailhead: this is always the best way to start off your Admin experience
Help & Training Courses: In order to access Help & Training, you will need to have a working Salesforce Production system. (Path: Your Name | Help & Training | Login with your Production credential | Find a course) I love how the video content is so detailed, and with the hands-on exercise, you can really gain a lot of valuable experience, however, this is only accessible through Production org only. I have been taken notes for those classes, I will organize them and post them on here also when I get a chance.
The follow are the notes I took when I was doing the Administration Essentials for New Admins. The course includes the following contents:
Another topic is Automation
Try to look for volunteer opportunities, so that you can earn hands-on experience through helping the others. I used VolunteerMatch to find volunteer opportunities. Please also connect locally so that you can not only build your connections but also you are gaining more experiences.
Developer Documentation: In the documentation, it includes Concepts, Infrastructure, Best Practices, Case Studies, etc. To me, it is really valuable.
If you guys have more valuable resources, please share with rest of us. In that way, we can go further as an Admin.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you.