Tips to pass the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Transition Exam

This is my first post since moving to Melbourne. It has been a rough and busy couple of months! I also have moved to a new website host so this is exciting!

So the background here is that I had taken the Platform Developer I beta exam when it came out and earned that credential. At that time I did not have the Advanced Developer cert. 

I earned that after a long wait for the programming assignment and then had to do the Platform Developer II transition exam to earn the Platform Developer credential.

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For one reason or the other, I kept postponing the exam and finally took it on Sept 30 after 1 day of study. Turned out to be pretty simple in the end if you have been paying attention to the last few Salesforce updates. 

Anyways if you are planning to take this exam, I would suggest that you take it at the earliest as the transition exam is not that difficult if you know what to study. 

A few other folks mentioned that the actual study guide is a bit unhelpful which I tend to agree with. The study guide is here. But use that as a starting reference. 

The exam itself comprised of just 35 questions. You have 1 hour to complete and need to get 63% of the questions right which is roughly 23. So if you are confident about 25 questions then you will have no problems in passing easily. 

For me, this was the first time I took an exam online. So it was a bit of a tense few minutes before the exam started. But it was smooth overall. I was asked to adjust my camera twice during the course of the exam but it did not distract me much so thanks to the Kryterion folks. 

I took about 45 mins to complete and review once and then see the golden PASS message. So now I am 11x certified. Still quite a few certs to go. 

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Anyways these are the important topics for this exam. Use the Salesforce help pages to read more about these topics. 

Note: These are general study topics which are found in the study guide but highlighted below to pay special attention to. THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE. 

You will need to know syntax in general for APEX, VF and SOQL. 

STUDY TOPICS:

  1. Compound fields – Learn the different types of compound fields and understand the considerations and limitations. Pay atention to DISTANCE and GEOLOCATION formulas. 
  2. Advanced Currency Management – review this topic and also pay attention to how you would approach this in SOQL or SOSL. 
  3. How would you manage exchange rates when multi-currency is enabled?
  4. Understand Continuation Calls and why they are needed.
  5. Review best practices for test classes and why the new @testsetup annotation is used. Understand its considerations. 
  6. Review how to query for permission sets in SOQL. Pay close attention to the various aspects of this namely the relationship between the user and permission set and the user licence.
  7. Understand the @invocablemethod annotation and how it differs from Process.plugin and the @invocablevariable annotation.
  8. Understand the basics of lightning components. Best to skim through the Lightning components developer guide and understand the first few chapters. 
  9. Pay attention to how you would mock classes for http callouts v/s web service callouts?
  10. Review the web service class and understand what kind of arguments it can accept and return. 
  11. Visualforce best practices
  12. APEX best practices
  13. Order of Execution
  14. Understand how to use the developer console and its components. How can you debug your code using this? (Spend some time on this. I missed some questions on this and they are easy to get!!!!)
  15. Apex charts – Pay attention to the various options and attributes. 
  16. Efficient ways of querying parent-child object SOQL or performing parent-child object DML. 
  17. Rollup summary considerations.
  18. Know when to pick the best automation tool for a given scenario. 
  19. Review the VF apex:action… tags and understand their usage. 
  20. Finally skim through the apex and vf developer guides. Note: I was not able to do this in detail due to lack of time but if you have time then go for it. 

Overall if you know the above topics and reviewed the study guide you should pass quite easily.

Good luck and as always, you are free to ask me questions in the comments.