For those of you who are interested in becoming a Dynamics CRM developer, this article will present some general advice in preparing you with the typical prerequisites of the role.
What technical skills do I need as a CRM Developer?
As a Dynamics CRM developer, you must have an understanding of a few computer languages so that you can take advantage of the right kind of tool for the job whether it be client-side or on the backend.
You will need to know C#
C# is used for writing plugins in Dynamics CRM on the event execution framework, you will need to be fluent in C#. This will allow you to write and deploy code known as plugins that will contain the custom code that you want to execute when certain events happen in the CRM platform.
Learning C# will also be important because if you end up needing to build any custom workflow activities you will also need to understand how to leverage these tools within the CRM platform.
Although the built-in workflows in CRM can solve many use cases, you will need this language in your arsenal of development tools in order to solve for other issues that will arise outside the basic workflow scope.
There will also be times that you want to host custom pages or C# ASP.NET custom pages to perform some additional functionality. Maybe a custom front-end that integrates into the App. With all that CRM requires C# is a must to be an effective developer on the product.
You will also need some traditional web development skills such as HTML, CSS, and JS
Since Dynamics CRM is a web application you can additionally tailor and customize it by using traditional web pages and javascript (known as web resources) in the CRM Platform.
There is also built-in business rules UI within the CRM platform, but the reality is that the types of validation and checking are limited and you will find yourself writing a library to perform regular functions in your deployment.
You need to have a good understanding of SQL Server and SQL Reporting Services
The need will arise from time tt time to create some custom reports you will need to also create linked data sources if there are any internal apps that you need to also join in order to build out any custom cross-system reporting.
This is very common with on-premise systems that have many other lines of business applications that have important information to summarize for reporting purposes.
It is additionally great to understand SQL and SQL Reporting services because under the covers of the report writer in CRM is basically SQL reporting services. Understanding the inner workings of the technology will also help you deliver additional reporting options when the UI report writer fails to meet your use cases.
You will need experience with Web Services
One of the primary ways that CRM allows extensibility from your custom apps or even external applications is through its built-in web services. This allows you to manage various aspects of the CRM deployment as well as the custom entities and objects that are built on top of the framework.
There are many options on the type of web services that you can use from REST, ODATA, to even the updated Web API that can be leveraged for custom interfaces, integrations, or for surfacing data from other systems to your users in CRM.
You need experience with Visual Studio
There are many CRM SDK’s, helper tools and deployment wizards that you will not be able to take advantage of without using the Visual Studio IDE. This also makes compiling and deploying your code to each of your environments easier and efficient.
You need to understand the capabilities of the built-in tools in the CRM Framework
It is hard to overstate this enough as don’t become one of those CRM developers that believe they have to essentially reinvent everything from the group up. It is best to make sure that you not only understand the capabilities of the customization tools but what the platform already does out of the box.
You may not like the out of box feature and that is ok, but just know that the out of box feature is most likely going to migrate better into the next release of CRM than possibly some of your custom code.
This also gives you as the developer a much wider range of the possible solutions you can bring to the table.
What certifications do I need?
It is recommended to at least go for the Core sales consultant associate certification, which will require your understanding of most of the builtin modules of sales and customer management within the CRM environment.
From here you can build out your knowledgebase and certifications over time and dive into the more complicated ones, but getting started this is the one I always send new developers to.
What other skills would be handy to have as a CRM Developer?
You need to have some good soft skills as well if you want to grow in the role of a Dynamics CRM developer. The reason is that many of the stakeholders will be high-level or C levels in your organization.
If you are making changes to the sales or marketing processes you will need in many cases to have their buy-in to get things off the ground. This is where some good communication will come in handy.
How do I find work as a Microsoft CRM Developer?
At the moment I would say it isn’t that difficult to get into the field as a developer at the moment even if you haven’t had much experience as a developer.
There are even specific recruitment specialists that work in the Dynamics industry placing the most qualified applicants into offers fairly quickly as long as you can demonstrate that you understand the technology and have experience as well in a support role.
If you have no experience at all you can try freelancing as well to businesses that utilize the Dynamics Framework. You will find that your CRM skills in solutions building will transfer well over to additional areas of Dynamics technology such as development on the CDS (Common Data Store) Platform.