About Ryan

I am a certified Salesforce Developer with ~3 years' experience administrating and developing Salesforce and ~5 years' experience working with data. I work for The Wonderful Company where I am part of the Data team for Wonderful Education (WED), a Wonderful Company philanthropic initiative with the mission of improving educational attainment in California’s Central Valley.

My role within our organization is to develop and maintain our Salesforce org which was first set up in August, 2020. Before adopting Salesforce, WED managed its caseload of 3000+ students entirely from spreadsheets, so I have witnessed firsthand the transformative effect that Salesforce can have on efficiency and general organization. Since WED adopted Salesforce I have been skilling up aggressively using Trailhead and other self-learning platforms in order to be able to help mold and shape the system as WED’s processes and mission evolves. I earned my System Administrator and Platform App Builder credentials in early 2021. I earned my Platform Developer 1 credential in early 2023.

Before WED implemented Salesforce, my primary responsibilities were data management and data analysis. During this ~2-year period I acquired skill with Python and the Pandas data manipulation library in order to compile data from many different sources for visualization in PowerBI and Tableau. With that experience I learned much of the challenge of discovering insights from data actually occurs well before any interesting analytic techniques are applied to the data. The organization’s data need to be captured, cleansed, and stored in a manner that facilitates subsequent analyses. This clarified for me the value of CRMs and other PaaS platforms as a logical next step for organizations who have outgrown their existing methods for managing their information. It also resulted in a realignment of my professional goals to center on data infrastructure.

A focus on infrastructure and building suits me as I am an engineer and builder at heart. Prior to my intentional career shift into working with data and data systems, I had worked as a mechanical engineer for four years. My education background is in engineering and computer science. I earned my MBA in 2018. Business school was very important in helping me to understand how important data is to businesses and how data abundance is transforming society.

My near-term professional goals are to work as a Salesforce Developer and long-term I intend to focus on data systems architecture and implementation more broadly.


Curriculum Vitae

                          

Certification

Education

  • MBA (2018)
    Summa Cum Laude
    Voted the MBA program’s 2018 “Outstanding Graduate” by business school faculty
    Cal State University Bakersfield

  • BS in Mechanical Engineering (2013)
    Computer Science minor, Mechatronics concentration
    Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Work Experience

  • CRM Administrator (2021 - Present)
    The Wonderful Company
    Salesforce development, administration, and data management responsibilities. Data analysis and reporting using Python and PowerBI.

  • Data Analyst (2018 - 2021)
    The Wonderful Company
    Quick-turnaround analysis and reporting on semi-structured data using Python and Tableau.

  • Design Engineer (2015 - 2017)
    Western Power Products

  • Product Development Engineer (2013 - 2015)
    ITT Aerospace Controls

  • Mechanical Design Intern (2012)
    ITT Aerospace Controls

  • Engineering Co-op (2011)
    Parker Fluid Systems Division

Other Coursework and Training