Adding a link to your Trailhead profile page on LinkedIn

What if you want to show the world how much work you've put into earning Salesforce Trailhead badges, but you don't want to clutter your LinkedIn profile with a long list of badges?

Here's one alternative I implemented on my LinkedIn profile. Under the Certifications section of my LinkedIn profile, I added one "certification" called 75 Salesforce Trailhead Badges. If you click on it, you will be taken to my Trailhead profile page which lists all Trailhead badges that I've earned to date.

So how do you find your Trailhead profile link, and how do you ensure that all of the world can see your accomplishments? Follow these steps:

1. Login into Trailhead at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/.
2. Click your name in the upper right corner of the Trailhead home page to show a drop-down menu, and then select Profile from the drop-down menu.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the About Me section. For Profile Public, does it say Yes? If not, click the edit pencil icon nearby, change the Profile Public setting to Yes, then click Save to save the change.
4. At the very bottom of this page is your Profile Link which shows all of your badges. This is the same URL as the URL of the page you are viewing. Copy this link to a text editor.
5. Log out of Trailhead and all other Salesforce-related sites, then go to the link you copied to ensure that your profile is visible to anyone and not just you.
6. Once you've verified that your Trailhead profile page is visible to anyone, paste your Trailhead link into your LinkedIn profile. As I mentioned previously, I put this link under the Certification section of my profile by adding a certification with the Certification Name of 75 Salesforce Badges and used my Trailhead profile link in the Certification URL field. You may want to put your Trailhead profile page link in the same place or somewhere else (e.g. in your LinkedIn profile's Summary, Education, or other section).

For more LinkedIn tips, check out my one of my other blogs, LinkedIn Notes.

Workaround for 404 error in Salesforce University online training

In the "Managing Your Users' Experience" module of the "Building Applications with Force.com - Part 1" online training course, the link in the "Resources" tab didn't work for me using the Firefox browser on Windows 10. When I clicked the link to open the PDF file "Managing Your Users' Experience Exercise Guide", I was taken to the following page which showed a 404 error for file not found:

https://lms.cfs-api.com/v1/content/0c212b73-220c-4643-a42d-dad0f6e233f5/presentation_content/external_files/managingyourusers

Looking at the name of the PDF file, I figured that the file name has an apostrophe in it that was causing the problem, so I looked up the URL encoding for the single apostrophe and found it to be %27. So I added %27experienceexerciseguide.pdf to the URL to produce the following URL which enabled me to open the PDF file:

https://lms.cfs-api.com/v1/content/0c212b73-220c-4643-a42d-dad0f6e233f5/presentation_content/external_files/managingyourusers%27experienceexerciseguide.pdf

If you are getting the same error for the same PDF file but the link above doesn't work for you, try adding %27experienceexerciseguide.pdf to the URL you get after clicking the link for the PDF file.