Face it – you want to sweep Lightning Experience under the rug and forget that it’s even there. This is the general sense I get from the broader Salesforce community and the Salesforce Admins that I speak to (in general terms). The anxiety of migrating to Lightning is just too much to contemplate.

The response to Lightning Experience can be justified. Perhaps it was rolled out too early and it’s taking a while for the features to catch up (or whatever your rational is). But the reality is that Lightning Experience is quickly improving, and becoming a viable alternative to Classic for all organizations. Yes – even yours.

A Quick Rant

Excuse me while I get on my soap box for a moment.

When I ask Admins how many of them have created a sandbox and activated Lightning Experience, the response is surprisingly low – somewhere around 25% or less. Why is this? Why are you waiting to jump into Lightning?

Every new innovation brought to market creates two types of people: those that naysay and refuse to adopt, and those that grab the bull by the horns and leverage that disruption to get further in their careers; to become an expert.

In the 2016 film Hidden Figures, Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer) finds out that her job as a computer at NASA will soon be going away thanks to the new IBM 7090 computer. After learning the news, she took it upon herself to become an indispensable resource by learning Fortran – the programming language – on her own. Not only that but she taught all of her colleagues as well. In the end, she and her colleagues were able to work as programmers instead of being let go. She reinvented herself.

Lightning Experience is the same. If you aren’t learning Lightning now, how are you going to be able to migrate your organization in the future? How will you remain a trusted resource and authority with regard to Salesforce? How will you be able to administer a Lightning only org with a new employer?

It’s time to get out of your comfort zone and grab the bull by the horns. You must begin to learn Lightning. This is not a passing fad. It’s reality. So, will you be a naysayer, or are you going to leverage the change to advance your career?

Take a Hike

I want to encourage you to stop hanging around the sidelines. Let’s start this journey together.

Lightning Experience is a totally different animal than Classic. In fact, I am going to say that you need to forget your entire approach to Salesforce. The concepts and methods you used to tackle business process improvements is going to change drastically. That’s why we need to study up!

There are a number of official resources available to help you learn the basics of Lightning Experience. Trailhead is where I want you to start. Here are three trails that you should start with. No matter your thoughts on Trailhead, these are extremely valuable and I highly encourage you to start here. These trails will get you familiar enough with Lightning to play in a dev org, and they will also teach you the LEX lingo needed to speak intelligently to features and capabilities.

• Get Started with Lightning Experience
• Optimize Sales Features for Lightning Experience
• Migrate to Lightning Experience

Be sure that you do these trailheads in your own developer edition org! We don’t want to activate LEX in your production org by accident, and any badges you earn you want to be able to keep even when changing jobs. If you don’t have a free developer edition org, you can sign up for one here.

Migration Assistant

Next, I want you to create a sandbox in your org just for you. You don’t need to ask permission, and you don’t need to share it with anyone. I want you to create this sandbox and walk through the activation checklist. Understand the process of activating LEX. One of the really cool items that Salesforce has provided is a Lightning Experience Readiness Check report. It evaluates your org and provides a detailed list of items that may not yet be compatible with Lightning. Here’s a report from my own dev org.

After you walk through the Lightning Migration setup, activate LEX in your sandbox. Then, begin to find improvements that only Lightning can provide as a way to build your familiarity and build a use case for a migration to Lightning later down the line.

Remember, this is just a way to explore. I’m not asking for you to start a project plan or strategy to migrate to Lightning. Just start to get your feet wet.

Admin Hero is Here to Help

I’ve noticed that there is a gap in the marketplace for information about Lightning Experience. That’s why I’m going to leverage this innovation myself, and being writing more about LEX basics here on Admin Hero. I’ve added the Lightning Experience category page to the top navigation so that you can quickly and easily find all Lightning related content on Admin Hero.

You’ll begin to see this list grow over the next few months. If you’re interested in a specific topic, please email me – brent@adminhero.com – and I’ll get it added to my list of Lightning topics for publication.

Let’s do this together.