Breaking Into Tech With a Nontraditional Background

Jul 31, 2025

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Derika West, IT Application Support Analyst II at KinderCare Learning Companies. Join us as we chat about how she got started in her tech career and how she started her Salesforce journey.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Derika West.

Getting started in a tech career

Derika started her career in the U.S. Army as a Carpentry and Masonry Specialist. From there, she bounced around between service industry jobs while she tried to figure out what was next. “There’s no way I could get into tech,” she told herself, “that’s way too smart for me.”

However, when Derika moved to the West Coast, her friends believed in her. She applied for a position as a QA Test Technician, and spent a lot of time figuring out how to pitch her skills in a way that would make sense for the role. And that position gave her a foothold into an entirely new career.

Getting hands-on with Salesforce

In her current role, Derika is the SME for her organization’s transition from Classic to Lightning. It’s an org with over 40,000 users, so change comes slowly. She found herself in more and more conversations with end users about their pain points using their Salesforce deployment, and started looking for solutions.

One thing that has been very helpful for Derika is to reach out to the people at her organization who are more experienced with the Salesforce platform. Even learning the basics of what they do and how they got to where they are today was very helpful in making the decisions that would shape her career.

Why you should go to a Salesforce Admin Meetup

Derika resolved to go to the next Portland Salesforce Admin Meetup, where she happened to meet Admin Evangelist superstar Kate Lessard. “I told everyone in the room that I’m new and I know nothing about what I’m doing,” Derika says, “and everyone was so welcoming and so helpful.”

Kate connected Derika with Supermums, an organization that provides training and volunteer opportunities to help people get started with a career in Salesforce. She’s about to take her certification exam, and let’s all send her good vibes and good luck.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Derika, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Josh Birk:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Salesforce Admins Podcast. I am your guest host, Josh Birk, and today I’m delighted to bring Derika West onto the show, to talk about her journey into Salesforce, into the world of tech. And where she is on that journey, where she’s looking for to go. Welcome to the show, Derika.

All right, welcome everybody to the show. Today we are going to welcome Derika West to talk about her journey into Salesforce, where she is with it right now, and we’re her future looks. And Derika, in looking at your CV, it pretty much starts with your military experience. What was it like being in the Army?

Derika West:
Yeah. The Army was a wonderful thing for development for myself. I’ve always been a self-starter, I would say. And someone who thinks outside the box. And I just didn’t know where that would fit for me in terms of which direction of a career I wanted to take. I initially started in college, and then I met somebody in my math class in college who was actively in… I think it was the reserves at the time, and I think she’s full-time active duty now. But we just started talking about options of careers. And I’m always asking questions, as you’ll find out. I just asked her, what is it like being a female in the military? And she just said, “There’s so many things that you can do as a female that you aren’t really told growing up, and even high school.”

For me, I never considered the military as an option for me. And then, I just learned that there’s so many different routes you can take. It’s a way to build yourself up and get some self-confidence, really, as a female. And so, I ended up speaking to a recruiter, got involved, and then I joined the Army. And did battle buddy things with her and talked to her throughout my journey. It was really great. Yeah, I had a good time in the military.

Josh Birk:
So two follow-up questions to that. First, was there something about the Army role that you were looking at that you were… Going back to your point, I didn’t know. I didn’t think about me being as an engineer because I haven’t seen a lot of women in tech, women in engineering, stuff like that. Was there something about the role that was like, oh, this could be something cool and new that I could learn that I hadn’t thought about before?

Derika West:
Yes, absolutely. That was one of the main points for me in joining the military. I really wanted self-confidence. I wanted to build myself up, and I didn’t know where to start. For me, the military seemed like a wonderful route. It had a lot of structure. I was looking for discipline, I was looking for travel, I was looking for all the things that the military had to offer. And I think anybody knows that the military is very eager to get people in. Yeah, it was pretty much, once I talked to a recruiter it was no-brainer after that.

Josh Birk:
Nice. I got to ask, what is traveling with the military like? I can imagine it’s wildly different from commercial.

Derika West:
Absolutely different. You are definitely the government’s property. Anywhere that they say you’re going, you’re going. Luckily for me, my first duty station was Hawaii, so I got very lucky.

Josh Birk:
There you go.

Derika West:
And it was just, I lucked out because nobody else got a duty station like that. And I know my brother-in-law, he’s currently active in the Army, he doesn’t really get that much flexibility on travel. But it’s definitely, it’s very safeguarded when you travel. It’s not picking the cheapest flight and going somewhere beautiful. It’s very structured in that way.

Josh Birk:
You roll the dice, sometimes you get a 20-unit up in Hawaii, but other times maybe not so much. That makes sense.

Derika West:
I got very, very lucky. Yes.

Josh Birk:
What was life after the military? What was that like?

Derika West:
Life after the military was a bit confusing for me. I was struggling with figuring out which path I wanted to take for my long-term in terms of career. Outside of having that structured day-to-day life, I was pretty much a spinning compass at that point. I decided to move back home and start from the ground and spend more time with my family. Recharge my roots back home a bit. And then for, I would say, about five to 10 years there I was just doing service industry things and just trying to find my way. And then I made another move after that out to the West Coast. And then I got more connections out here, much different than the Midwest, and found my way into tech eventually. But it did take me a while to get to this point.

Josh Birk:
You moved to a new coast and you started getting into tech. What was the appeal of tech to move all the way out there and try to get a job in it?

Derika West:
Life brought me out to Oregon. I was looking for expansion. I wanted to really grow myself physically and mentally, and I wanted to learn things that were outside of my Midwestern bubble.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Derika West:
I felt like when I came out to the West Coast, a lot of people acted different, they thought differently. A lot of the things that I learned about in the Midwest were produced from the West Coast, so I felt like I could [inaudible 00:06:12] to people here.

Josh Birk:
I love that. I love that.

Derika West:
You feel that… I don’t know how to put this. You’re from the Midwest.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Derika West:
You feel a bit siloed in the Midwest. And I never really considered tech as a career option for myself when I was living there. So when I moved here and I started hearing about all these new people and different career paths, I was like, I need to expand my brain and I need to think outside the box of these potential possibilities for myself longterm. I think, really, it came down to the careers before this point that didn’t work out for me. The things that I liked about those careers and the things I didn’t like about those careers. And then just simply networking with like-minded individuals who were really interested in self-growth and just being in a space of learning more. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
What were some of those early touch points of here are other people in a similar situation that they’re trying to put themselves into a new skillset and something in technology?

Derika West:
Honestly, it started with meeting a software engineer in a friend group. And she worked for a local cannabis company here in Oregon. And she and I just started chatting, and I just asked her what she liked about tech, what got her into it. And she gave me the breakdown of her day-to-day. And just asked if I had ever considered getting into tech. And my response was, “I’ve never considered that. And also, it’s way too smart for me. There’s no way I could get into tech, I don’t understand anything about it.” That’s my first touch point in getting some exposure.

Josh Birk:
It’s such an important one. I feel like there’s so many people that I’ve met over the years who just needed that one friend to help demystify it a little bit.

Derika West:
Definitely.

Josh Birk:
It’d just be like I’ve done interviews where people are like, “I challenged myself to learn JavaScript by not going out socially for three months, but now I work in my dream job.” So that [inaudible 00:08:27]. What was some of your early successes? What jobs were you getting into?

Derika West:
My first job was a QA test technician, which I would’ve never pictured myself doing ever, but it was incredibly helpful to get me started into tech. It was everything that I didn’t know that I needed getting into this industry. It taught me how to ask hard questions. It taught me how to put myself in uncomfortable situations, and just to get into something that I know nothing about. And I honestly didn’t even think that I would get a QA job, but it really laid the foundation of my tech career.

And I am very lucky and fortunate that I got that job. Because coming from a background that has zero experience in tech, I really had to talk myself up about the skillset that I had prior to that position, and that was something that I didn’t know would sell. And I just did a lot of research prior to my interview and I looked up what a QA does. I looked up where you could go with it. And I just was doing a lot of homework, I guess you could say. Just doing a ton of research.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. And what I love about this, and for anybody who’s listening, and if this vibes with you, I know so many people who are now product managers and senior engineers, and all of these things, and a lot of them got their start in customer support or QA. And I think part of it is you get confronted with technology that even if you didn’t build it, you have to understand its working parts. Right?

Derika West:
Right.

Josh Birk:
And then, also that QA mindset is also very similar to a programmer’s mindset, to a developer’s mindset. I’m going to get the joke wrong, but it’s like the QA engineer enters the bar. The bartender says, “What do you want?” And it’s like, “One beer, two beers, an owl, no beers, zero, null.” You have to take in all these weird use cases. Then, how did you start… Was your transition into more of the software side of things, was that Salesforce itself, or was there a transition period?

Derika West:
There was definitely a transition period. I went from QA to my current role, which is more software-based. My QA position was more testing hardware behind the scenes, working with our devs and working with the product owners and things like that. My current role is more end user facing, but also working with the product owners and other teams. It’s a lot of cross collaboration. In my current position, that’s where I work directly with Salesforce. And I work with their team, and I’m the person who’s the SME of our current project. And undergoing a bunch of transition from changing our old Salesforce platform to Lightning, which is a new one, for those who don’t know about it.

Josh Birk:
Welcome to the club.

Derika West:
It was quite the transition. Yeah, yeah, it was big. It’s huge. We have 40,000 users. It’s a lot.

Josh Birk:
Oh, wow. You have 40,000 users?

Derika West:
I can’t exaggerate that enough. Yes.

Josh Birk:
And how many of them are system administrators?

Derika West:
Honest, on our Salesforce team, I don’t know at the moment. But for me, it’s just me on my team.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Okay. It’s the old admin joke, 200 people in the company, 180 of them are system administrators.

Derika West:
Right. Yeah. Few and far between, that’s all I got to say there.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Which is the way it should be. What was it like… I’ll just come right out on that. What was it like learning Salesforce?

Derika West:
Learning Salesforce was something that was self-taught for myself. I knew absolutely nothing about it. I was like, “What? What do you sell? What products do you sell?” Even my family was like… My grandma was like, “Salesforce is you’re selling things?” And I was like, “No, no, no.”

Josh Birk:
Right.

Derika West:
Yeah. I had no idea what it was, so I just simply pulled out my resources. I started asking about it. I asked our Salesforce team, “Hey, what do you do? What is Salesforce?” And I had individual meetings with every single team member on that team for myself. And I just made it a point to let them know that, “Hey, this is something I’m very interested in. And on my outside working hours I’m learning this on my own.”

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Derika West:
So, yes, Trailhead was my first stop. Trailhead was very overwhelming for myself. I was like, where do I start? And also, what am I supposed to be studying? And then I found Trailmixes. And then one thing just led me to another thing, and that’s just how my tech journey has been since the beginning. I found that just played out in my own learning with Salesforce. So, that’s how I got started with that.

Josh Birk:
How long do you think you took from you, okay, I want to put this under my belt? Because you work with other applications as well. Or at least you have been, right? Like, oh gosh, I want to say Office 360, and that’s the worst example.

Derika West:
Office 365, yeah.

Josh Birk:
Like, who doesn’t?

Derika West:
Yeah. What is your question?

Josh Birk:
Well, no. Yeah, let me start with the question, because that was a tangent [inaudible 00:14:27]. Anyway, it worked in my brain. I swear it worked in my brain.

Derika West:
It’s like…

Josh Birk:
How long do you think it was before you’re like, oh, I really want to put this in my tool belt, I’m going to take some time that’s my own personal time and I’m going to start learning it, until you were like, I feel pretty comfortable that I could help administer our Salesforce work? What are we talking weeks, months here?

Derika West:
I would say about the three-month mark into our transition with our project at work is when I was like, okay, I’m fully going to dive into this and take the reins myself. Because I noticed there was a gap between our team and the Salesforce team. And I was helping these end users on a live call, and they would become extremely frustrated. It’s a big pain point in our company, and I’m the one to bring it up because I’m going to bring it up, because I want change and I want things to be smoother for people. And that’s really what I’m passionate about in this career is helping people.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Derika West:
And I told our Salesforce team, “Hey, I do not have permissions to do X, Y and Z. Can you get them for me?” And they said no. And then, I took it upon myself to start going to more Salesforce related things so I could learn the platform better. It came down to me and wanting things to be better for myself and for other people, but no one would have bridged that gap had I not been in that gap.

Josh Birk:
Right. Did you eventually get those permissions?

Derika West:
No, I did not.

Josh Birk:
Okay. All right.

Derika West:
But I am in a place where I’m in a transition, so I understand the business needs and I understand the Salesforce side of things as well. It’s my passion hobby right now is learning Salesforce on the side. And it’s taught me a lot.

Josh Birk:
At least you can be that interaction between a user and what Salesforce is when the Salesforce team isn’t in the room. Yeah.

Derika West:
Right. Exactly.

Josh Birk:
Now, you recently got involved in Supermums, right?

Derika West:
I did, yes.

Josh Birk:
How did that get on the radar? And can you give us a quick elevator pitch on Supermums?

Derika West:
I will try my best.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Derika West:
As I was mentioning before, I work full-time. In my application support role, I am wanting to get into our transition to the admin role. I went on Trailhead and I found one of our local Portland admin meetup groups, and I noticed that they had one coming up. I think it was back in February, it was like four months ago. And I was like, I know nothing about automation. I have no idea how it works, but I’d love to know. I’d love to learn more about this thing. So I just went as a newbie to one of these local admin group meetups. It was my first one ever. And at the end of the meeting I met a wonderful human, her name’s Kate Lessard. Shout out to you, Kate.

Josh Birk:
Shout out to Kate.

Derika West:
Hey, Kate. We just started connecting afterward. I told everyone in that room that I’m new, I know nothing about what I’m doing. And everyone was so welcoming and so helpful, and it just further enhanced my want to be in the Salesforce ecosystem. So that’s where I got started. And then Kate introduced me and gave me a bunch of resources after that meetup, and Supermums was one of those things. And Supermums is a global training program, and it helps people transition their careers and also learn Salesforce. And it can help you get into the tech industry if you aren’t already in. They offer flexible hands-on courses. They offer one-on-one mentoring sessions, and then career coaching. And then all of that bundled together at the end, you’ll get hands-on work experience with nonprofits. It’s a really cool program, and not something that I knew that I would get into. But I wanted more structure for myself, and so I just reached out, I just sent them an email. And I think there’s one slot left.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Derika West:
And I was like, sweet, okay, I’m going to take this opportunity to learn more. And I got in there.

Josh Birk:
Love it.

Derika West:
That’s where I started, with Supermums. It’s been a game changer, for sure.

Josh Birk:
And I’ve talked with people who there are similar programs out there. But the thing I love about that structure twofold is the fact that I find that a lot of… Without the soft skills part of it, without the career advice part of it, like, okay, now you have a certificate, now what? But the nice thing about getting to work with nonprofits, first of all, nonprofits love people who work with Salesforce that can help them. They need this help so badly. Back when I was consulted, nonprofits and small businesses were always my favorite. Because that thing that you just fixed for them has probably been annoying the heck out of them for the last year. And suddenly you are the superhero, you’re employee of the month.

But it also solves, because I’ve talked to developers, I’ve talked to admins, and they’re trying to get a new job, and it’s the classic tech chicken and egg problem. You have no experience. I want a job. Well, I won’t give you the job because you don’t have any experience. And it’s the two things. If you can work with a nonprofit and be like, “This is what I have fixed for them.” I’ve told developers, just go get a developer edition and start coding. Just have an application that works that will prove to people that this is going to work.

Derika West:
Right.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. I’m assuming the learning experience has been good. Where are you in the course history right now?

Derika West:
Yeah, we’re actually in exam prep, so we’re at the very end. And everyone is extremely nervous to take their exam, including myself. But I am also really excited, because I know that everything I’ve been learning over the last six months has really helped me in my full-time position, and will only further enhance my skillset moving forward. I’m really excited.

Josh Birk:
And I will repeat words of advice I’ve gotten from people who have taken multiple exams in our own Salesforce certifications, and stuff like that, and people who are now technical architects. It’s like, always remember, failure is an option. It doesn’t mean you fail, it just means it’s part of the learning process. They do happen, but good luck. Sorry.

Derika West:
Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
I didn’t want to be pessimistic with that, but it’s always like we have… It’s part of our ecosystem a little bit, like coders who think that they have to be perfect. No, your code’s going to break the first 15 times you’re trying to make it. That’s just the iterative process.

I want to shift gears a little bit, because I get paid a nickel every time I say the word AI. And I guess this is a weird question now that I know that your current big project is moving from classic to Lightning web components, so you might be a little hindered with this, but let me ask. In general, AI has become such a focus of all of our lives. How do you think it’s been… Has it impacted your work? Not necessarily even in an agent force point of view. But when you’re learning things or you’re researching things, has AI either impacted your work or your life?

Derika West:
On the work aspect, we are gearing up for AI. And that was actually one of our meetings today was going over the impact that it’s going to have on our applications. We’re literally switching every application that we own over, and we’re going to start implementing AI. Our daily functions, how we support users. So it’s going to be really exciting, but we’re not there quite yet. We’re at the very beginning of that transition, and Salesforce being one of them. That’s on the work front. On a personal front, I’ve been using AI to do so many different things for myself. To help learn at my own pace, to gather different types of documentation for myself just to organize my thoughts better. It helps me brainstorm better. It helps me get all my ideas down into a simplified version. AI is something I utilize all the time, if not daily. I love AI, and I’m excited to see how it’s going to grow the ecosystem.

Josh Birk:
Yes, and the same. And it’s like, you’re definitely sounding… From a work point of view, I think that’s where a lot of people are right now. It feels like a lot of people are moving out of the awareness phase and more to an adoption phase. That was a lot of nickels, so thank you for that. Okay. I have one final question for you. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?

Derika West:
Oh, goodness. Favorite non-technical hobby is probably hiking or snowboarding. I’m going to put them together because they’re one in the same. Hiking as a summertime activity-

Josh Birk:
I was just going to say.

Derika West:
… then snow [inaudible 00:24:12].

Josh Birk:
Yep. That totally tracks. And you are in a perfect part of the world in order to do both of those things.

Derika West:
Yes, yes. Those are definitely my hobbies. It’s summertime here in Oregon now, so I’m taking full advantage of all the beautiful hikes nearby. And then, during the winter I go up to Mount Hood and snowboard.

Josh Birk:
That’s awesome.

Derika West:
It’s been great.

Josh Birk:
Awesome.

Derika West:
I love living here for those reasons.

Josh Birk:
I love it. All right. Well, Derika, well, first of all, good luck on your exams. And thank you so much for the conversation, it was a lot of fun.

I want to, once again, thank Derika for the wonderful conversation. And of course, I always want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the transcript, and also see our blogs and our videos and other aspects of being a Salesforce admin. Thanks again everybody, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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