Last year I delivered some training for the Salesforce Marketer Group (Pardot), New Delhi, India. I was covering the Pardot Administration section of the exam. I wanted to share the recording of the session, along with a written summary of how we can break down the topics to be more manageable.

Link to Video:  

The Administration topic of the Pardot Specialist Certification is, in my opinion, a quite tricky topic from a learner’s perspective as it has the potential to be extremely wide in scope because of the huge range of configuration option in Pardot. It’s very easy to go down the wrong route and spend days learning topics which will not be assessed on the exam.

This means that as a learner, you’ll really need to focus on what is in the exam and try to just leave aside anything that isn’t in the exam, to ensure that you’re as prepared as you can be. The first thing we want to look at is the exam guide. I’m sure you’ve all seen the Pardot specialist exam guide - here’s a link to the Pardot Specialist exam guide in case you haven’t - but let’s start by breaking down some of the content specific to the administration section.

What Should I Learn?

Looking at the administration topics, what we can see is that the topics are quite narrow. I mentioned there’s so many different configuration options in Pardot, but the exam guide is telling us to focus on three main areas:

• Looking at how to create edit and map fields
• The relationship between Pardot and Salesforce
• The Pardot recycle bin

If we look at the exam as a whole there are 60 questions in total, so the 11 percent of the exam for administration, means that you will get around six or seven questions specifically on this administration topic.

What Should I Not Learn?

In the exam guide, we can see that a candidate for this exam is not expected to know the following:

• Package installation
• Layout configuration
• Salesforce configuration of Pardot

This means we don’t need to focus on these topics from an exam perspective, and equally configuring scoring and grading models is actually covered in one of the other topics which you’re going to have to study for separately. So we can again leave this aside and try to focus on the first three topics.

For an in-depth training session on those topics, you can watch the video above.