Einstein Analytics has been an area where I was very reluctant to tread. I don’t have a computer science background and I never took a data science class or studied statistical analysis. I did have to takes one math class while earning my Bachelors of Music Performance and the class I took was “Math for the Everyday World”. Hearing all of that you might be surprised that I've made it this far in the tech world. But I'm also really stubborn...which tends to come in handy in my learning process. So while it took me a bit longer than I had hoped to become Einstein Analytics proficient, I’m so glad that I persisted. More than a year ago, a few of my team members and I went through several introductory training classes to try to "learn Einstein". Unfortunately, our main take away was that the interface was very foreign and that Einstein Analytics was much more complex than we had expected. I knew that we didn't have the skill set to leverage Einstein at that point, but it went on my list as something I wanted to learn in the not too distant future. And thanks to Trailhead and a number of excellent community resources I passed the Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant exam last month. About the ExamHere are the subject areas that are covered on the exam. Do not skip over this part! Knowing how the different sections are weighted and the specifics of what you need to study in each subject area is the most important step in preparing for this type of exam. The full exam guide can be found here.
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Education Cloud Applications, Settings, and Configuration: 23%
| Domain Expertise: 19%
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Here's Where To Focus
If you haven't figured it out yet, the industry clouds (with a few exceptions, i.e. Commerce) tend to be an installed package with a set of custom objects and custom code that overlay the standard Salesforce data model. Education Cloud is no different.
The Education Cloud data model is similar to Nonprofit Cloud but has a few custom attributes that allow for student recruitment, advising, enrollment and course management. These are the key capabilities of Education Cloud along with alumni engagement (where Education and Nonprofit cloud start to blur together a bit).
So it should come as no surprise that understanding the Education Data model is very important. Here are the key components of the EDA data model:
Here's how all the objects fit together:
The Education Cloud data model is similar to Nonprofit Cloud but has a few custom attributes that allow for student recruitment, advising, enrollment and course management. These are the key capabilities of Education Cloud along with alumni engagement (where Education and Nonprofit cloud start to blur together a bit).
So it should come as no surprise that understanding the Education Data model is very important. Here are the key components of the EDA data model:
- Accounts- In addition to the "household model" you might be familiar with from NPSP, there is an account model option in EDA called "administrative account". Administrative accounts can be departments, education institutions, sports teams or academic programs.
- Affiliation - a junction object that connects a contact to an Account.
- Program Enrollment - a junction object that links the contact and the academic program record together.
- Term- a school term or academic session with a start and end date.
- Course- a class that fulfills a certain number of credit hours.
- Course Offering- a unique instance of a course associated with a specific term.
- Course Connection- an object representing the relationship between a student and a course offering.
Here's how all the objects fit together:
In addition to the data model, I would recommend spending some time understanding the types of reports that the Education Cloud is designed to generate and how to go about customizing report types to visualize data that users of the Education Cloud might want to generate.
Finally, read up on the Student Advisor Link (SAL), a custom app designed to work with Education Cloud. The complete details of the SAL can be found on the Power of Us Hub here: https://powerofus.force.com/s/article/SAL-Install-Package.
Which is a great seguey to my final area I would recommend focusing on, the Power of Us Hub! Know what you can find there vs. the Trailblazer Community. Also, understand the difference between the standard Salesforce Release cycle (three times a year) and packages like the SAL. They are not the same!
Finally, read up on the Student Advisor Link (SAL), a custom app designed to work with Education Cloud. The complete details of the SAL can be found on the Power of Us Hub here: https://powerofus.force.com/s/article/SAL-Install-Package.
Which is a great seguey to my final area I would recommend focusing on, the Power of Us Hub! Know what you can find there vs. the Trailblazer Community. Also, understand the difference between the standard Salesforce Release cycle (three times a year) and packages like the SAL. They are not the same!
Similarities And DifferenceS
- You might notice that the exam guide for this exam is MUCH shorter than the exam guide for the Nonprofit Cloud Consultant exam. While this doesn't mean that this exam is any easier, it does mean that this exam has a narrower focus. Which can be good or bad depending on how familiar you are specifically with the EDA architecture and use cases for using Salesforce for student enrollment, admissions and advising.
- Relationships and Affiliations are key to both exams:
- Affiliations connect contacts with accounts. In EDA these accounts can represent education departments, sports teams or prospective employers.
- Relationships connect contacts with other contacts. Of particular importance is the Reciprocal Method setting for relationships. This setting determines how EDA generates your reciprocal relationships (i.e. daughter-mother and mother-daughter). There are actually two options you can choose from: list setting and value inversion. Know how picking one or the other effects relationship creation!
- Both exams assume you are familiar with the capabilities of Marketing Cloud and Pardot, and test that you are capable of recommending one over the other. At a high level, here are the key differences between Pardot and Marketing Cloud. TL;DR: Marketing Cloud has more capabilities, but with those capabilities comes additional complexity.
Top 5 Resources To Prepare
Here are the top five resources I used to prepare and pass the Education Cloud Consultant exam:
In Conclusion
Overall, I'm glad I took the time to study for this credential. Learning about the architecture of the EDA model was really interseting, and seeing how sophisticated some of the features of Education Cloud have become was really impressive. Especially since so many of these features have been developed (at least in part) by the Salesforce Community.
Author
Susannah Kate St-Germain is a 20x certified Colombian-American Salesforce nerd, travel fanatic, and aspiring Certified Technical Architect.
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