Salesforce Career Conversations #6: Jackie Heath

Episode 6: Salesforce Career Conversation with Jackie Heath and ROD. Jackie started her career as a trainer in Siebel and switched to Salesforce when she thought her career was over. Thirteen years later she is the Director of the Trailhead Academy at Salesforce. Lee: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the latest edition of RODcast. In today's episode, I'm chatting with Jackie Heath, who has worked in the Salesforce ecosystem in the UK for 13 years now, as of recording in October, 2019. She's risen through the ranks to her latest role, which she's got a very long title, at the mothership itself, and has got a fantastic career where she can help guide you with what she's done from training to being a contractor, to working with an end-user, to working at partner, to now working for Salesforce. Hopefully, you'll really enjoy this episode. Thanks a lot guys, and hope you enjoy it. Lee: Joining me today is the ... Let me get this right, the delivery director for the Trailhead Academy at Salesforce, Jackie Heath. Hello. Jackie: Hello. Hi, Lee. Lee: Thanks for joining us, I really appreciate you doing this. Did I get the title right, because it is a mouthful, isn't it? Jackie: You did. It is a mouthful. It's a bit longer, so you've used the abbreviated version. Lee: Wow. Yeah, because it was the EMEA bit that I didn't add onto that. So as you know, and you may have heard in some of the other ones, this is a chat about your career to date, really, as you've been in Salesforce for, I'm blushingly groping for ... It's over 10 years, isn't it? Jackie: It is over 10 years. It's coming up for my 13th year, in fact, in the ecosystem, not necessarily working directly for Salesforce. But yeah, 13 years. Lee: That is fantastic. As you well know, my prior question will be, or my first question will be, what were you doing leading up to getting into Salesforce? Jackie: So I'm going to show my age here a little bit, which is embarrassing. But when I graduated, the world was really moving from DOS to Windows. So that does really date me. Before I got into the world of Salesforce, really, I was kind of in IT training and IT support roles, primarily for law firms, before I started my journey with Salesforce. Lee: So even ... Because you went to university, I believe. Jackie: I did. I went to ... Well, I'd say I went to Oxford Poly. It is a now a university, but when I was there it was a Polytechnic. My degree is completely and utterly unrelated to what I do now, really. My degree was in hotel and catering management. I'm often asked how did I make that transition? One of the things I would say about my degree, whilst it was based on the hotel and catering industry, it was very much a kind of business studies degree, applying it to hotel and catering industry business type things. So I had a friend who did do a business studies degree as well, and we did almost identical topics. Except when she had some coursework to hand in, or a project to do, she could pick any industry she liked, our industry always had to be something related to hotel and catering management in some way. Lee: I don't want to put words in your mouth, but did you sort of all into the training side of things then? Jackie: I did. I did, completely and utterly. So whilst the world was moving from DOS to Windows, it was also, when I graduated, a recession. For graduates, it was really quite challenging to get jobs as graduates back then. I know many graduates might say that sometimes it's quite challenging today, as well. But I applied for a job to be a graduate trainee trainer, and I got the job, because what this particular company had set themselves up was to basically help people, again, law firms, typically, moving their legal secretaries across from typewriters and Word Perfect for DOS over to the Windows world, and using a mouse, and using a GUI user interface. Jackie: So I got that job that way. I have to say,