Episode 18: Salesforce Career Conversations Peggy Schael with ROD. Peggy talks about her career in Salesforce and how she progressed to co-found a training platform to help others to become certified.
Lee: Hello, it's Lee Durrant here again with another episode of RODcast, where, as you know by now, we dive into people's Salesforce careers to find you, hopefully, little nuggets of inspiration that might help you in your Salesforce career. I'm really pleased to say that joining me today on the podcast is Peggy Schael who is the co-founder of WeLearnSalesforce. Hi Peggy.
Peggy: Hi Lee, nice to meet you, and thanks so much for having me here.
Lee: I'm really, really thankful that you've agreed to join. I think I saw what you do on LinkedIn and thought it's quite interesting. We'll see if we can have a quick chat and share some of your story or even all of your story with people that are listening and want to be inspired perhaps as to what happened in your career and how you got to where you are and what you're doing, and maybe how that can help them as well. I was looking with interest. Maybe a little overview for us first and then we'll go back to the beginning if you like. Do you mind just telling us a little bit about what you do right now and then we'll rewind?
Peggy: Yes, yes, of course. I'm more than happy to share my story and I have to add, this is my very first podcast, so please be gentle on me.
Lee: That's okay. I won't ask anything too tough but yes, you fire away.
Peggy: As you introduced, I'm Peggy Schael and I am a Salesforce trainer and have been a Salesforce trainer for many years now, and a bit over, I think two years ago, we founded WeLearnSalesforce, our online Salesforce learning platform where you can go and watch video tutorials and get Salesforce certified or do a Salesforce certification training and prepare for the certification and all of that is provided in video tutorial format. You can watch pretty much any time from anywhere you are. That's where I am right now.
Lee: Where you are right now, brilliant. I'd be interested to find out how you got into it but maybe before that, what were you doing pre-Salesforce? What was your career up to that? I had a look obviously I could see a bit of HR recruitment in there back in the day.
Peggy: Yes exactly. It's probably not what you expect, someone being in the Salesforce trainer role. I pretty much stumbled into Salesforce. It's one of the stories I've already shared and how I got into Salesforce. I worked for various management consulting companies before I moved into Salesforce. They were mainly roles around event management and human resources and recruitment and staffing, and then a little bit of project management. Pretty much roles that had to do with working with people and getting things organised. Mostly what we called back-office jobs where you would just really work behind the scenes and get people out there.
It had literally nothing to do with technology or in IT and CRM systems, maybe Excel spreadsheets, but certainly, nothing to do with CRM systems or anything like that. I thought this is pretty much where I'll be working for the rest of my life. Then what happened was that my partner and I, we moved back to Australia. We lived in Australia before and then decided to go back to Australia. We left our jobs, we left everything behind, and moved to Australia. Then I had to look for a new job in Australia, specifically in Sydney. I was looking around and then I came across yet another consulting company.
They had a job opening for a Salesforce project manager, and I thought, "Okay, I have a bit of project management experience," but Salesforce, I had no idea what Salesforce was.
Lee: Peggy, just a rough idea when this was?
Peggy: This was in 2013. It's been a few years back now. Time flies.
Lee: Yes, well, you're not wrong. Nearly 10 years ago then I suppose.
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