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About

Mission

CertifiedOnDemand.com was founded to help test takers prepare for Salesforce.com certification exams and build amazing careers within the Salesforce.com ecosystem.

My Story

My name is John Coppedge, and I am the founder and primary contributor to CertifiedOnDemand.com.

I started my journey in 2008 as an #accidentaladmin (an administrator born from need rather than experience).  I was working as an IT administrator for an organization that purchased Salesforce.com, and I was deemed the administrator.

I quickly realized that Salesforce was a massive platform (and it was MUCH smaller then), but also one that I really loved working with.  At that moment, I realized that’s where I wanted to focus my career.

When Salesforce announced their certification program, I was in.  I started studying and posted my notes to forcecertified.com, the world’s first website dedicated to Salesforce certification.  I also became one of the first 500 people in the world to hold a Salesforce certification.  I’ve since completed many more certifications (see below).

In 2010, I became a full-time Salesforce consultant.  After years of traveling extensively and implementing Salesforce for a range of different customers and verticals, I decided to take a step back and see if I could put together something better to help people obtain their Salesforce certifications.

Six months later, CertifiedOnDemand.com (Version 1) was born.  It both took longer and was more challenging to create than I initially expected (not surprising in retrospect).  I didn’t have much experience with curriculum development or website design.  I didn’t really know what I was creating when I started the project.  But I put something together and launched it, and that really was my goal in itself.  I didn’t really have expectations – and in fact, it would take a few years for the site to pick up speed (I didn’t really know much about marketing either… that hasn’t changed much).  I didn’t imagine I would get feedback that CoD had changed lives or launched careers, but that type of feedback started coming in.  And I am truly grateful to those of you that do send these types of notes as they are tremendously motivating.

After launching CoD, I both needed and wanted to get back to work.  I started consulting once again and was enjoying the work.

Then, an opportunity arose.  A friend joined a Salesforce-based product company and asked if I would be interested in joining.  I interviewed for both professional services and sales engineering positions, and ultimately accepted a position as a sales engineer.  I enjoyed many aspects of sales engineering, however, what I really liked the most was the educational component.  So when another opportunity arose within this company to move into a training position, I jumped.

I got to put to use some of the experience that I gained while working on CoD, and I learned so much from interacting directly with students.  By joining a relatively new training team, I got the opportunity to wear many hats: developing and delivering both admin and end-user training, managing training org configuration as well as the process for creating them, participating in scoping calls, and much more.

All of this experience got me to thinking about how CoD could be done better.  I started playing with some ideas, and many months later CertifiedOnDemand.com (Version 2) was born.

My Certifications

Here is my current list of Salesforce certifications, verifiable here.