Episode 3: Mitesh Mistry Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. One of only 300 Salesforce Certified Technical Architects on the planet discusses his career and how he got there.

[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]

Lee: Hi there guys.Welcome to RODcast. In today's episode I'm chatting with a Mitesh Mistry. Mitesh currently one of only a few hundred certified technical architects in the world and he's going to discuss with us in this episode his journey to becoming a CTA. His favourite project to date in Salesforce and what it's like to also work at the mothership of Salesforce and, and what he's excited about for the future. So hope you enjoy.

Hello, it's Lee Durrant here. Welcome to RODcast, the podcast where we get to meet and chat with some truly fantastic people from within the Salesforce ecosystem. My goal for this podcast is to help and inform people who either already perhaps work in the Salesforce ecosystem or maybe you're thinking of breaking into it to understand what's good about it, what could be better, and where there are opportunities. And what some of the most amazing people in this space, how they got into it and where their career took them and what their plans are for the future. Hope you enjoy it. And please help me to reach as many people as possible within Salesforce by leaving some comments and sharing, all feedback welcome. So yeah, hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2: So hello Mitesh. And welcome to our podcast, which we're calling RODcast. Thanks for doing this, mate. How are you?

Mitesh: I am good, thank you. How are you doing Lee?

Lee: Yeah, yeah, getting there. Getting there, mate. Wish the weather was better but, not bad at all. But again, really appreciate you doing this. Quite exciting for everybody listening, because correct me if I'm wrong, you are a certified technical architect now aren't you?

Mitesh: Yes, that's correct. So I'm a Salesforce CTA as of May, 2018.

Lee: Last year. So that's fantastic. Obviously as you know, as I explained to people listening before that that this podcast is all about the journey of Salesforce experts. You know from different sides of what you guys do. But someone like yourself, it'd be quite interesting for people to hear about how your journey began if you like with Salesforce and all of that. And then what led you to where you are today? Cause I'd be quite interested to find out if this was all planned at the beginning or whether it's just happened organically as you've gone on.

Really. So if that's all right, I'll fire away with a couple of questions to get started. And then the obvious first thing to ask you is actually in the lead up to getting into Salesforce what, what were you doing? You were at university before.

Mitesh: Okay. So I mean, let me run through my background. So I studied software engineering at the university of Edinburgh. And as part of my experience there, I got a chance to spend a year overseas. So I worked for a company called Sun Microsystems who are now taken over by Oracle and I was looking after the global labs team there. So had a really good experience for one year out in the US that was my first technology role, looking into IT. Sort of hardware networking systems and understanding how they work.

And I also do a small role with the Royal Bank of Scotland where I was building some internal applications for them. As part of my work experience as well. So I had a bit of experience before graduating. And when I graduated I got a role working for Deloittes in their graduate consulting programme.

And my very first project was more doing Java development, a bit of Selenium testing as well. And we're building a digital rights management solution for a really large media company in London. And after doing that build for three months, they wanted to use the salesforce.com platform to be able to capture different members, different musicians,