Alli Gunderson made a bit of a splash last week when her alma mater and largest business partner both featured her in stories about the Salesforce skills training course she’s teaching. Alli is a 2017 graduate from Butler University who has carved out a nice niche for herself at Wipro in Indianapolis.

Wipro (formerly Appirio) has been a top tech employer in Indy since relocating here from the West Coast in 2015. The global consulting company employs some of the very best Salesforce certified consultants, data architects, and creative strategists to help their clients close the gap between people and technology to achieve successful digital transformations.

Check out the two stories featuring Alli on the Butler University blog and Salesforce Partners blog.

Butler Students Learn Salesforce Skills Through Free Course, Thanks to Local Alumni

By Katie Grieze

With more than 150,000 companies using Salesforce, and recent estimates showing that the platform’s ecosystem will generate millions of new jobs by the year 2024, new graduates entering marketing, sales, IT, and similar fields are likely to encounter the software at some point in their careers.

Most employees need to learn Salesforce skills on the job. But during the past academic year at Butler University, students have had the opportunity to build a foundation of Salesforce experience in the classroom through a free course taught by Butler alumni.

Alli Gunderson ’17, who majored in Economics while at Butler, now serves as a Salesforce Consultant with Wipro. In her day-to-day role, she works with clients to find ways that Salesforce products can meet business needs, then provides guidance on how to implement and use the platform. She draws on that experience, as well as the formalized Salesforce training Wipro provides for new hires, to teach in-demand skills to Butler students.

“I’m excited to be teaching Salesforce, getting people learning it before they come into their jobs,” Gunderson says. “The Salesforce ecosystem is booming, so this course gets students familiar with the software.”

Through a partnership between Butler and Wipro, the non-credit course is offered through Butler’s Office of Career and Professional Success (CaPS). With three hours of live instruction each week, lessons cover the basics of customer relationship management (CRM)—a process that helps companies organize their relationships and interactions with current and potential customers. Gunderson says students are also prepared to take Salesforce’s administrator certification exam, and completing the course even allows them to waive the $200 exam fee. READ MORE

Training Future Salesforce Admins

By Kiley Smith

Today, we spotlight how Wipro Limited and Butler University have teamed up to teach students Salesforce Admin skills. Alli Gunderson, Associate Manager, and Rajeev Kumar Singh, General Manager, share more about the course.

Give us a snapshot of the semester-long course.

Alli: The Introduction to Salesforce course we’re teaching at Butler is designed to give students foundational knowledge of Salesforce technology, its uses in the business world, and the variety of careers available in the Salesforce ecosystem.

After each lesson, we recommend Trailhead work to students to solidify the concepts covered in class. We’ve also introduced our students to a hands-on case study where they learn about a company, their pain points, and the scope of their initial Salesforce implementation. Each student took a scope item ranging from documentation of user stories to big deal alerts and custom objects. Then, at the end of the semester, each student presented on what they built, how they built it, and what they learned along the way. We’ve been amazed at how much the students have learned and their ability to apply it to a real-world scenario. READ MORE