With 150,000 customers from small businesses to the who’s who of the Fortune 500, Salesforce’s dominance of the CRM market is hard to question.

The SaaS giant’s ecosystem is also shaping an entire employment market, with forecasts showing that it will create 4.2million jobs globally (150,000 of those in the UK) between 2019 and 2024. Even more interesting, Covid-19 has only accelerated this impressive growth.

So back in March, when the world went into lockdown, creating and delivering a Salesforce Apprenticeship was just another idea floating about in the heads of the team at LDN Apprenticeships.

Fast forward to today and we have launched our Salesforce Consultant apprenticeship, our Salesforce Administrator programme will go live in February and we have plans to launch our Salesforce Developer programme in July.

Needless to say, it has been a productive period for the team!

As we built these programmes and spoke to employers about their content, one thing became apparent – our employers would find the programmes even more valuable if we were able to put forward apprenticeship candidates who had already gained a good understanding of the Salesforce platform.

The obvious way to do that would be to train them up and help them to pass the Salesforce Certified Administrator exam before they started to interview for apprenticeship opportunities.

But how could we do that? The ADX201 course costs north of £3,000 per head if you buy it on the open market.

So, when the opportunity to bid for funding from Stride came along, we were over the moon and immediately set to work on our proposal.

Stride is a partnership of the London Boroughs of Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and Wandsworth, focused on expanding the creative and digital industries in South London. The £1million Talent Development strand of the programme aims to widen access to the creative and digital industries in the four London boroughs.

Our proposal was simple. We would use funding from Stride to create our own Salesforce Administrator training course and offer this course for free to young people from the four boroughs. We would focus our recruitment efforts on high achieving people from underrepresented groups, including women, ethnic minorities and those from low-income households.

We know from 10 years of experience that many of these people have done everything right. They have been to school, college and university. They’ve achieved great academic results and they’ve worked hard. But through no fault of their own they are unable to access opportunities in the creative and digital industries through no fault of their own.

TalentPath will break this cycle and give young people from underrepresented groups the opportunity to break into one of the most exciting, fastest growing job markets in the world.

The project will offer fully funded training to prepare participants for the Salesforce Certified Administrator exam. An intensive two-week administrator bootcamp, will be followed employability training and links to apprenticeship and employment opportunities with LDN’s network of Salesforce employers.

TalentPath goes straight to the heart of some of the most pressing challenges in the UK jobs market today:

Widening access to in demand technical, digital skills;
Ensuring opportunity in the digital industries is more evenly and fairly distributed;
Creating a sustainable and diverse talent pipeline that addresses the nation’s digital skills shortage.

The project is open to people aged 18 and over and who live in one of the four London boroughs. Participants may be school leavers, university graduates, career changers or those who are seeking work. The only other requirement is a commitment to become immersed in the Salesforce ecosystem, the course and the opportunities that arise from it.

TalentPath will be running monthly cohorts from January 2021, with the first intake starting on 15 January 2021.

We are absolutely thrilled to be launching TalentPath and we cannot wait to see the project change the lives of the people who participate in it. Our thanks go to the team at Stride who are supporting the project.

If you are an employer who would like to find out more about the programme, please get in touch with our corporate partnerships team here.

If you are aged 18 or over and live in Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark or Wandsworth and want to apply to the TalentPath programme, please visit the TalentPath page on our website, here.