“[I] give myself a bit of grace and recognize it doesn’t have to be perfect when it comes out of the gate. ”

— Ernesto Villarreal

For Ernesto Villarreal, his latest work role as Salesforce Administrator and Technology Coordinator at Habitat for Humanity of Michigan is a place he has “landed through the trajectory of my career.” Although he has always had a love of technology, he had never touched Salesforce until almost two years ago when he was working with homeowners for Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity. He started asking questions about why Salesforce wasn’t used for certain organizational functions, and before he knew it, he was tapped to become the go-to resource for the affiliate support organization in Michigan.

He has held the official Salesforce Administrator role for only about 6 months, quickly coming up to speed in what he calls “trial by fire.” How did he do it? According to Ernesto, “One of the reasons I was so adamant in learning the org was to support the mission of the organization, which is to help people have safe, decent, affordable homes. That's definitely been a passion that hits home for me. It combines two things that I love - the work that Habitat does as well as my love for technology.”

He readily admits that he’s made a few mistakes along the way. He laughs about the time he was working with Ashima and needed to create a custom field. He created the field with a page layout, and set the page layout from the page layout everyone had without remembering to first check the visibility settings. As a result, he set it for everyone to see the field – oops. Changing the visibility back to hide the field wasn’t hard, of course, but it was time intensive.

The important thing Ernesto notes about working with technology is that it helps to be a lifelong learner. He focuses on “remembering to give myself a bit of grace and recognize it doesn't have to be perfect when it comes out of the gate. You just have to be willing to live with the consequence of that action.” Even if that means an extra 20 minutes to clean up whatever you did.

Ernesto tries to keep the approach that it's OK to try, and to be wrong, as long as you're willing to rectify it. That in turn gives him confidence and motivation to try and push the limits, and to learn something new.

So far, his experience as an administrator has helped him become more cautious and more detail oriented. Although Ernesto still doesn’t consider himself an expert at Salesforce, he is definitely knowledgeable, and looks forward to obtaining certifications in the future.