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It’s a stupendous achievement to earn your Level 3 Gainsight Admin Certification. People who’ve done it have said that certification gave them confidence in their technical expertise, opened doors to more interesting work, and overall helped their career. They’re also extremely clear, though, that they don’t know everything yet! (I mean, because it’s impossible, and not only because there are constantly new features.)

One newly-certified Level 3 Admin asked me what resources I’d suggest so they could continue to grow. Here’s what I suggested:

  • You will learn most, now, by doing. For you, it's less about learning functionality, and more about becoming creative, sophisticated, and elegant with how you combine and configure the functionality. So, give yourself a gentle pressure in that direction as you take on new projects, or even suggest to your stakeholders what might be possible.
  • As you push the envelope of what you've built, lean on the admin community for questions around, "What might it look like to do ____?" Community.gainsight.com is the place to post (plus searching existing posts), along with the Admin Slack channel at bit.ly/gsadminslack
  • Use the community, the beta program, and Release Notes to watch for new things to tinker with. Configuring things -- even if it's merely to see how they work -- will give you more expertise and inspiration. Identify the hour each week where your brain is most creative, and work is least chaotic, and reserve it to play with anything new.
  • If the time zone works for you, join admins' self-organized meetups. Those sessions will give you both inspiration and assistance, not to mention camaraderie and enthusiasm. For a massive dose of that, if you're able, come to Pulse. (Read admins' reactions to Pulse 2022.)
  • Use the CS Ops Mentor Program. You will likely benefit from even one in-depth conversation about your current challenges with someone who has more experience than you. And, as a mentor yourself, you will become a greater expert in your own skills by explaining them to people who need the experience that you have to offer. Similarly, even answering questions in the community will help you hone your knowledge, and make you better at working with less technical colleagues.

What would you add to the list?? Post any idea below!

Ask yourself whether you want to go very very deep in Gainsight, CS Systems, Revenue Systems, Operations, etc? Align your focus areas and next steps accordingly. 

@seth ,This is really helpful and clearly illustrate how amazing you have a team spirit and your keen aspiration to make everyone on the GS journey grow. Thank you!  I also emphasised the point by @gunjanm , to be successful a Gainsight admin should go and refer the other aspects , specially the Customer Success Managers side. From their documentation and requirements one can understand the pain point, the situation and targets , so that a design and implementation on the Admin side would be much easier.

I’m afraid you are reading my mind, this post is very very timely... I got certified last month so I set myself a new goal: to be more proactive in the Community. I’m dedicating each day some time to see what’s out there, what can I learn, help with questions if I can, saving links from both Slack and the Community to a personal “catalogue” for future reference so I can bounce ideas off my team… I know that I know nothing 🤓
And TIL some new stuff too, including the ability to nominate yourself for a Beta 😁
Thanks for sharing!

I would agree with all of this! I was an accidental admin and inherited our instance. In those situations you find things that have maybe been patches or workarounds for things that didn’t exist yet. So, tons of tech debt. I’m having the most fun unwinding it all and seeing how we can condense and clean up! and in doing that, enhancing. 

For me, it’s definitely the first one: learn by doing, and make those mistakes. 

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