Journey of a middle class boy from Customer Support Agent to Salesforce known personality.
By: Akashdeep Arora
Tags: Salesforce, Trailhead, Success Story, Trailblazercommunity, Trailblazer

Journey of a middle class boy from Customer Support Agent to Salesforce known personality. Akashdeep Arora Jan 22·7 min read

Greetings to all, many people asked me to write my success story and here I am sharing my journey with lots of ups and downs. I would not say it a success story but rather it’s a reality of a common middle class boy who comes from a town called Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Many people say that I am very successful and lucky too who is enjoying his life and travelling multiple countries but I smile and think deep inside that they don’t know the real struggle and lots of rejections that I faced in my early career. They never know that there are lots of sleepless nights behind this face.

I faced my first rejection when I was in my college and got rejected from one of the leading IT company TCS in the final round which came for on-campus recruitment in my college and here my rejection journey started. I completed my graduation in 2015 and stepped out of my hometown to fulfill my dreams and there I got first job as a Customer Support Executive in a very small startup BPO company after lots of rejections with not more than 4-digit salary per month.

The reason I am sharing my initial salary figure because today I see lots of students gets discouraged & demotivated when they come to know about a company which is paying very less compensation and they deny to join the organization just because of less salary no matter they have other options or not. I agree compensation in India is very less as compared to work but I would like to advise everyone starts from zero and even I did. People were criticizing me you have done B.Tech and just earning this much money. I just kept quiet and focused to move forward.

As per my experience, salary doesn’t matter in the beginning, grab the experience and learning which will definitely impact your future in a positive way. The problem with today’s youth is that they run after the money since the beginning only and don’t want to do job at low wages. You can’t be a millionaire in a day. It takes lots of sleepless nights but it takes just a day to change your life.

If I can, then anyone can.

I got my first salary cheque of Rs 9091 and that too got bounced as Company had insufficient fund. I took a flight and traveled to the Silicon Valley of India, i.e. Bangalore where many students go out with so many hopes in their eyes. I had heard that there are lots of IT companies in Bangalore and one can get job easily there. I agree with the former part but not with latter. It’s not that easy to get a job there as well.

I used to walk all day long in sunlight from here to there to search for interview drives but in reality it was not only me, there were thousands of aspirants like me who were searching job there. I remember I used to attend drives where around 10000 students used to come for an interview. You can imagine the probability and ratio of getting selected in the company. The company used to select just 10-20 people only out of the bulk data. Oops, I mean there were so many students.

The company usually used to have first round as Group Discussion in order to remove the crowd and irony is that I was not a very good communicator that time and faced rejection again and again. I used to follow “Chetanas Forum” for daily walkin information in Bangalore and freshers might get help from it.

I always faced rejection, rejection and rejection.

I think there was any company from which I was not rejected that time. At one moment, I felt to update status on Facebook as FEELING REJECTED.

I had lost all the hopes and I was not able to see any opportunity in front of me. You name any company from where I was not rejected like TCS, Wipro, Accenture, IBM, Capgemini, Siemens, Infosys, Deloitte, Dell EMC, HCL, Mindtree, HP, Mphasis, Trigent Software, PWC, Sapient, Broadcom, CGI, Igate, Maq Software, Marlabs, Tech Mahindra and many more startups & others mid-sized companies. At some point, I thank to God because had I been selected in these organizations earlier in my career, I would not have come this way long with lots of failures and learnings.

Success comes from experiences, and experience comes from bad experiences.

To be very honest and frank, I got rejected in more than 50 companies during those days. Yes, you read correctly.

If I talk about today, I received a lot of messages from students who gets discouraged if they don’t get selected in even just one company. I hope my journey will somehow influence their mind & motivate them and they will not lose hope. I always guide everyone to try again and again like I did.

I always say;

NEVER GIVE UP.

I used to teach online solving the education questions of students and I used to get paid Rs 1 per minute. If I take 10 minutes time of one online student then I used to get Rs 10. It’s all about traffic how much students I used to get daily on that particular website. There was a time I just earned Rs 800 in a month.

Well, after 3 months of job hunt in Bangalore I got a job in support role but to survive, I took that job. I was not aware of Salesforce that time but fortunately I was working on Salesforce support role that time which helped me to know about it. Later on, I switched couple of organizations to move into development technologies and today I am working at Senior designation in one of the leading IT MNC company and Salesforce Strategic Partner in the world. Salesforce is the best thing happened to me.

When I was struggling for couple of years and doing nights shifts too, noone was there to guide me. In order to help the beginners so that they don’t face those things which I went through, I started the campaign known as #BeASalesforceChamp in 2017 to help those who were unaware about Salesforce career path and need any guidance to be the part of Salesforce ecosystem.

I used to do a lot of Trailhead when I was learning Salesforce. I always advise and suggest upcoming generation to do at least one badge a day. You put a lot of time on social media, you can atleast find some time for one module for impacting your future only.

Remember one thing in life, you do good or bad for yourself only, noone will come to do your job. You are the reason of your success or failure and noone else.

To know more about #BeASalesforceChamp campaign, please read the path in the detailed way:

link.medium.com/tZsZpii7fdb

Later on, I felt the need to guide people for real-time scenarios in Salesforce as they were lacking hands-on experiences.

In order to meet the need, I started another campaign #MakingChampion on Twitter where I used to tweet the real-time task and many people got benefitted. If you want to see the task, search on Twitter with #MakingChampion #Task1 or #MakingChampion #Task2 or so on and you will get many real-time scenarios for your Salesforce practice.

To be clear about these hashtags, people DM me to ask whether they can use #BeASalesforceChamp or #MakingChampion in their posts or not. Anyone can use these hashtags, I would love to see more posts with these hashtags but please make sure your posts should be related to Salesforce and should help others in any way.

#BeASalesforceChamp and make others as well.

Last year, I received email from Salesforce where I was present in the list of 88 Trailblazers across the globe and I was recognized as #LightningChampion.

I feel privileged to get featured at multiple platforms on Salesforce like Trailhead.

Acted as volunteer and mentor on #Journey2Salesforce career fair in #TDX19INDIA.

Got appreciated multiple times for guiding people through #BeASalesforceChamp campaign from well known Salesforce executives.

Got featured on AppExchange too.

Even after so many years in my career, I can still feel the pain of beginners. They just need correct guidance.

I would like to thank Salesforce which changed my life forever. This is not the end as I am still learning. You will see me helping and guiding others like this way only even after so many years.

I am the founder of #BeASalesforceChamp and #MakingChampion holding 8 Salesforce Certifications and a Lightning Champion too.

You can reach out to me on Twitter handle @akashdeeparora1.

Wishing you all best of luck for your future. ❤️