Open ten Salesforce job postings and you will find the same words in all of them: Flow, reports, dashboards, Apex, “strong communication skills.” Read them closely and the postings that pay well ask for something different. They ask what you have owned, shipped, and fixed.
Most Salesforce skills lists online are a glossary of features. This one is built from what hiring managers actually screen for when they fill Salesforce roles. It covers the core skills every Salesforce professional needs, a skills list for each major role from administrator to architect, the AI and Data 360 skills now showing up across job descriptions, and how to prove each skill so it moves an interview forward.
Use it to find the gaps between where you are and the next role you want. If you are hiring, use it to write a sharper job description and a better interview.
Table of Contents
Top 10 Salesforce Skills Employers Want in 2027
If you only have a minute, this is the short version of the Salesforce skills list. These are the skills that come up most often in well-paid Salesforce roles heading into 2027:
- Flow and automation design, including migrating legacy Workflow Rules and Process Builder
- Security and sharing model design
- Data modeling and data quality
- Apex and Lightning Web Components, for developer roles
- Integration with APIs and MuleSoft
- Agentforce agent configuration, testing, and governance
- Data 360 and unified customer data
- Release management and Salesforce DevOps
- Industry cloud depth, such as Health Cloud or Financial Services Cloud
- Business process and stakeholder skills: translating needs, prioritizing, and pushing back
The rest of this guide breaks those skills down by role and shows how to prove each one.
Core Skills on Every Salesforce Skills List
These skills appear in nearly every Salesforce role, from a first admin job to a technical architect. Employers assume them at the mid-level and test them at every level.
| Core skill | What employers look for |
|---|---|
| Data model | Standard and custom objects, relationships, and when to use each |
| Security and sharing | Profiles, permission sets, roles, sharing rules, and field-level security |
| Flow and automation | Record-triggered and screen flows, plus knowing when not to automate |
| Reports and dashboards | Report types, summary formulas, and dashboards leaders actually use |
| Data quality | Validation rules, duplicate management, imports, and cleanup |
| Release management | Sandboxes, change sets or DevOps Center, testing, and rollback plans |
| Business process | Understanding how sales, service, or marketing work outside the system |
The last row is the one most often missing. Salesforce professionals who can explain why a sales team works the way it does build better solutions than those who only know where the setting is.
Salesforce Administrator Skills List
Admin is the most crowded of the Salesforce roles, so the admin section of any Salesforce skills list has two tiers: the baseline, and the skills that actually get you hired.
Baseline skills employers expect:
- User management, profiles, permission sets, and permission set groups
- Record-triggered and screen flows, including fault paths and debugging
- Reports, dashboards, and list views for different teams
- Page layouts, Lightning record pages, and dynamic forms
- Data imports, validation rules, and duplicate rules
Skills that separate senior admins:
- Automation strategy: migrating legacy Workflow Rules and Process Builder, which lost Salesforce support at the end of 2025, setting Flow standards, and retiring automation nobody owns
- Release management: sandbox strategy, deployment planning, and testing before production
- Data governance: ownership, naming conventions, field audits, and archiving
- Stakeholder management: running intake, prioritizing requests, and saying no with a reason
- Industry cloud configuration, such as Health Cloud or Financial Services Cloud
The second list is what moves an admin from support to platform owner, and it is where most of the pay difference sits. Our guide for Salesforce admin recruiters explains how employers test for it, and our guide to Salesforce technical debt shows why cleanup skills are in such demand.
Salesforce Developer Skills List
Developer demand fell 12% while supply grew 20%, according to Salesforce Ben’s analysis of the 10K ecosystem data. The roles that remain ask for more than Apex.
Baseline skills employers expect:
- Apex classes, triggers, and trigger frameworks
- SOQL and SOSL, including governor limits and bulkification
- Lightning Web Components
- Test classes with meaningful assertions, not just coverage
- Source control with Git and deployment through Salesforce CLI
Skills that separate senior developers:
- Asynchronous processing: Queueable, Batch, Scheduled Apex, and Platform Events
- Integration patterns: REST and SOAP APIs, named credentials, and MuleSoft
- Salesforce DevOps: CI/CD pipelines, scratch orgs, and automated testing
- Performance tuning for large data volumes
- Agentforce actions: building the Apex and Flow actions that agents call, and exposing APIs to AI tools through MCP
Platform Developer II plus production integration work is the combination that reliably moves a developer into the upper pay band. If you are deciding between the admin and developer tracks, our comparison of Salesforce admin vs developer roles covers the tradeoffs. For the integration and release specialties, see our guides to how to hire MuleSoft developers and hire a Salesforce DevOps engineer.
Salesforce Business Analyst and Consultant Skills List
Business analysts and consultants share most of their skills. The difference is that consultants carry delivery responsibility and often work across several clients.
Business analyst skills:
- Requirements gathering through workshops, interviews, and process observation
- Process mapping, current state and future state
- User stories with clear acceptance criteria
- Gap analysis between business needs and standard Salesforce functionality
- User acceptance testing plans and test scripts
- Enough configuration skill to prototype a solution in a sandbox
Additional consultant skills:
- Solution design and documentation for client sign-off
- Estimating, scoping, and managing change requests
- Delivery across a full implementation lifecycle
- Product depth in one or more clouds: Sales, Service, Experience, Marketing, or Revenue Cloud
- For technical consultants: integration design, data migration, and light Apex
The BA role has the most compressed pay band in the ecosystem, so these skills are best treated as a foundation for solution architecture. Our business analyst hiring guide shows what employers are buying when they open the role, and our guide to hiring Salesforce consultants covers functional and technical consultant skills in more depth.
Salesforce Architect Skills List
Architects are the most in-demand Salesforce roles heading into 2027, with technical architect demand up 27% and solution architect demand up 21%. This part of the Salesforce skills list is less about knowing features and more about judgment across the whole system.
Solution architect skills:
- Multi-cloud solution design across Sales, Service, Experience, and industry clouds
- Data modeling for scale, including large data volumes and data residency
- Choosing between declarative and programmatic approaches, and defending the choice
- Integration architecture and middleware selection
- Presenting designs to executives and, at partners, during pre-sales
Technical architect skills, in addition:
- Identity and access management: SSO, OAuth flows, and external identity
- Security architecture and compliance requirements
- Enterprise integration patterns and event-driven design
- Org strategy: single org vs multi-org, and governance for large teams
- DevOps and environment strategy for multiple teams shipping at once
- AI and agent architecture: how agents access data, what they are allowed to do, which model handles which task, and how actions are audited
Most architects reach these skills through years of owning progressively larger systems. Our guide to the Salesforce career path from admin to architect maps the steps, and our guide to how to hire an Agentforce architect covers the AI side of the role.
AI, Agentforce, and Data 360 Skills Across Salesforce Roles
AI skills now appear on the Salesforce skills list for almost every role. What employers want depends on where you sit:
| Salesforce role | AI and data skills employers look for |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Configuring agents and topics, writing agent instructions, prompt templates, building Agentforce Coworker skills, testing agent behavior |
| Developer | Building Apex and Flow actions for agents, API and MCP integrations, handling agent errors |
| Business Analyst | Identifying use cases worth automating, defining guardrails, measuring outcomes |
| Consultant | Scoping agent deployments, change management, adoption planning |
| Architect | Data 360 design, data access and trust controls, model selection, auditing agent actions |
The Salesforce Certified Agentforce Specialist credential is the clearest signal for this skill set. Salesforce describes it as covering both platform configuration and Agentforce capabilities, which matches what employers ask for. Our guide to the Agentforce specialist role covers the exam and the five skills that matter most.
The certification alone is not enough. Employers screening Agentforce candidates ask what went to production, what the agent did, and what changed as a result. A badge from a Trailhead module is common. A shipped agent with a measurable outcome is rare, and it is the most valuable line a Salesforce professional can add to a resume right now. Our summary of what Dreamforce 2026 means for Salesforce hiring explains which AI skills are rising fastest.
Non-Technical Skills for Your Salesforce Skills List
Every Salesforce job posting asks for “communication skills.” In an interview, that phrase breaks down into four specific skills:
- Translating between business and system. Explaining a sharing model to a sales VP in terms of who can see which deals.
- Pushing back. Telling a stakeholder that a request will create technical debt, and offering a better option.
- Prioritizing. Deciding which of twenty open requests matters most this week, and explaining why.
- Writing it down. Documentation that the next person can follow, and release notes users actually read.
These skills are hard to list on a resume and easy to spot in an interview. Hiring managers test them with scenario questions. Our guide to how to pass a Salesforce technical interview shows how to answer them.
How to Prove the Skills on Your Salesforce Skills List
Listing a skill gets your resume past a keyword filter. Proving it gets you the interview and the offer. Here is what works for each kind of claim:
| Skill claim | Proof that works |
|---|---|
| “Experienced in Flow” | “Consolidated 14 record-triggered flows into 4 and cut save time by half” |
| “Strong Apex developer” | A public GitHub repo, or a described integration you built and maintain |
| “Agentforce experience” | An agent in production, what it handles, and the measured result |
| “Release management” | Your sandbox strategy, release cadence, and a rollback you handled |
| “Stakeholder management” | A request you declined or reshaped, and what happened next |
Certifications filter the pool. They show you have learned the material, and employers check them. Our guide to the Salesforce certifications that matter when hiring covers which credentials carry weight by role, including the 2026 renames. Keep your Trailhead profile current and linked from your resume, because many hiring managers look at it before the first call.
Then put a number on what each skill is worth. Our 2027 Salesforce salary guide shows how the skills on this list map to pay at each level.
Frequently Asked Questions
What skills are on a Salesforce skills list?
A complete Salesforce skills list covers the data model, security and sharing, Flow and automation, reports and dashboards, data quality, release management, and business process knowledge. Role-specific skills build on that base: Apex and Lightning Web Components for developers, requirements and process mapping for analysts, and integration and solution design for architects.
What are the most in-demand Salesforce skills in 2027?
Architecture, integration, Agentforce, and Data 360 skills are in the highest demand, along with industry cloud expertise such as Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud. Employers increasingly want proof of production work, not only certifications.
What skills does a Salesforce administrator need?
Entry-level admins need user management, security, Flow, reports, and data management. Senior admins add automation strategy, release management, data governance, and stakeholder management, which is what moves them into higher-paying platform owner roles.
What skills does a Salesforce developer need?
Apex, SOQL, Lightning Web Components, test classes, and Git are the baseline. Senior developers add asynchronous Apex, integration patterns, Salesforce DevOps, and increasingly the ability to build actions for Agentforce agents.
Do I need to know how to code to work in Salesforce roles?
No. Administrator, business analyst, functional consultant, and many Agentforce roles are configuration-based. Coding skills are required for developer and technical consultant roles and are valuable for technical architects.
How should I list Salesforce skills on a resume?
Pair each skill with an outcome. Instead of listing “Flow,” describe what you built or retired with it and what improved. Link your Trailhead profile and list current certifications, but let production results carry the weight.
Build the Skills the Next Role Pays For
The Salesforce professionals who move fastest treat this Salesforce skills list as a map. They find the two or three skills between their current role and the next one, get real production experience with them, and describe the results in numbers. The Salesforce job market in 2027 rewards that kind of specificity more than any single certification.
Ready for your next Salesforce role? Talk to our Salesforce recruiters. We can tell you which skills on this list your target roles are screening for right now.
