Salesforce Admin vs. Developer vs. Consultant
New'Salesforce experience' covers three different jobs. Admins configure the platform with clicks: fields, page layouts, permissions, reports and flows. Developers write code: Apex, Lightning Web Components and integrations. Functional consultants work with the business to decide how Salesforce should be set up, and write the requirements. The pay and interview loops differ, and certifications don't always make the difference clear.
How to tell them apart on a resume
Administrator
Users, profiles and permission sets, page layouts, validation rules, reports and dashboards, Flow, data loads, Administrator certification.
Developer
Apex classes and triggers, LWC, SOQL, test classes, REST integrations, SFDX or Copado deployments, Platform Developer I/II.
Functional consultant
Requirement workshops, user stories, solution design, Sales Cloud or Service Cloud consultant certifications, user training, go-live support.
The question that settles it
“In your Salesforce work, did you mostly configure the platform with clicks, write code like Apex and LWC, or work with the business to design how it should be set up?”
Each term in plain English
- Salesforce
A dominant enterprise CRM platform with its own development ecosystem (Apex, Visualforce, Lightning) — 'Salesforce Developer' and 'Salesforce Admin' are distinct, specialized career tracks largely separate from general software engineering.
Ask “Was your Salesforce work custom development (Apex, Lightning components), or configuration and administration within the platform's existing tools?”
- Apex (Salesforce)
Salesforce's own programming language, similar to Java, for business logic that the point-and-click tools can't handle: triggers that run when a record changes, scheduled and batch jobs, and integrations.
Ask “Tell me about an Apex trigger or batch job that hit governor limits. How did you fix it?”
- Lightning Web Components (LWC)
Salesforce's current way of building custom screens, using standard JavaScript and web components. It replaced the older Aura framework, which in turn replaced Visualforce pages; many companies still run all three side by side.
Ask “Have you moved any Aura or Visualforce pages to LWC? What was hard about it?”
- Salesforce Flow
Salesforce's point-and-click automation tool: when a record changes or a user steps through a screen, a flow updates records, sends emails or calls other systems without code.
Ask “When do you build something as a flow and when do you write Apex instead? Give me an example of each.”
- Salesforce Certifications
Salesforce's own exams, organised by role: Administrator for configuration, Platform Developer I and II for code, consultant exams for specific clouds, and architect levels at the top.
Ask “Which Salesforce certifications do you hold, and which one was hardest to apply in real work?”
Open the full tool for the other look-alike pairs, role profiles, and the JD decoder.