Superbadges - The Franchise Continues
Trailhead Superbadges are getting a(nother?) makeover - you can read chapter and verse on the Salesforce blog at : https://www.salesforce.com/blog/salesforce-superbadges-on-trailhead/, but to save you the effort here are the important changes as I see them.
You Won’t Lose Your Badges or Points
This is what people really care about! Any Superbadges/Supersets will still appear on your Trailblazer profile and all the points you earned will still be there. This has the added advantage of annoying everyone who doesn’t have those badges, and as you have points that they can’t earn, your total can be forever out of reach. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this change at some point in the future.
Superbadges are no longer credentials
Sorry Salesforce, I don’t think anyone outside of your company really thought they were. Sure, they demonstrated that someone was prepared to put the effort in to learn about the specific area, and this went double when there were a bunch of badges that had to be earned to unlock them. However, I never saw a CV calling out the Apex Specialist Superbadge and thought “That’s good enough for me, I can skip the planned Apex portion of the interview”.
That said, I always liked the concept of a Superbadge making up part of a credential - for example when I earned JavaScript Developer 1, not only did I have to pass a Webassessor proctored exam (which I took in a testing centre in deserted Stratford about 3 days before lockdown!), I also had to complete the Lightning Web Components Specialist Superbadge. A superbadge which required the completion of five other badges to unlock it. Thus I had to prove that not only could I acquire and retain the knowledge, but I could also apply it to a business scenario.
I really like that combination, so I was a little disappointed to read that Agentblazer Legend status is intended to prepare someone for the Agentforce Specialist exam - I was hoping the exam would be required to gain the status.
Superbadges no longer have to be unlocked
Given that they aren’t considered credentials any more(!), it feels reasonable that someone should be able to tackle the superbadge without having to do a bunch of pre-work, especially if they already know the content. This change will certainly increase the numbers, which I’m sure is one of the desires behind these changes.
You can collaborate on Superbadges
This is another one where I’m seeing and upside and a downside. It’s been an ask for the community for a number of years to badges that we can work together on - it would turn events to push badges into mini-hackathons rather than everyone coming together to work alone in a large room. However, this change isn’t that, rather it’s to allow you to ask for help if you get stuck - people have always done that, but now they’ll get actual assistance rather than a lecture on why they shouldn’t be asking! To be fair, you can work on a Superbadges as a group going forward, but given they will all coalesce to a 1-3 hour format, it’s hard to see how you’d divide the work up.
Columbo Close
I can’t finish a post about Superbadges without one more thing - as I’ve said many times before, I’m not keen on the prescriptive nature of them. What I mean by this is you have to complete the work the way that Trailhead wants you to, even if there’s a different way that you prefer or think is better.
You aren’t judged on output so much as how you build it, and this means one of two things must happen:
You are given too much information about exactly what is expected to pass each challenge, making them easier than they should be.
You are given vague requirements, build something that satisfies them, only to find you should have used a specific feature that was never mentioned, making them more frustrating than they should be.
Generally I’m in favour of these changes, if for no other reason than Trailhead has plateaued a bit in the last few years, with not much in the way of changes or new features. This always happens once a platform has been around for a while, so it’s good to see there is still the appetite to shake things up.