So just some quick background on where I'm currently at. I went to a technical college and graduated with an associate's in Control Systems Technology (http://www.ranken.edu/academics/electrical-division/control-systems-technology), but had terrible luck landing a job after getting out. Eventually a friend was able to land me an internship at a small marketing company close to home. They mostly do email and call center marketing (through ActOn and Five9). They called it an internship, but it ended up being a call center job. Luckily, I have a pretty strong background in Excel, and was able to take some side projects with their database team to write up some macros that they just didn't have the time to make themselves. After a month or two, they decided to bring me on full time.

Right now, I mostly spend the day pulling data in and out of Salesforce, creating reports, making layouts, custom objects for some of our clients, things like that. I feel pretty comfortable in Salesforce, for the most part. A while ago, I was able to start messing around with APEX code when they needed some help with triggers, and have been getting more comfortable with making workflows. I'm wanting to learn Visualforce, but haven't had a chance yet. Also haven't had much of a chance to do much with the Opportunity object yet, either. My manager deals with all the permissions and security, so I have no experience with that, either. There wasn't much training, mostly learned by fire. Was able to teach myself the APEX coding by reading code that was already written.

The issue is that the company isn't doing too great. There were massive layoffs back in December, and another batch of layoffs a few weeks after that. I never ended up getting my yearly raise, and when I went full time, I only got an extra $0.75 (only making $12.75/hr right now). I tried asking about a raise, but the question is always dodged by management. The company is small, so the only way I could advance upwards is if I became incredible at sales overnight and moved to that department. I want to get more experience with other parts of Salesforce, but I'm pretty much stuck on list pulling and report creation for now, and still do more Excel work than anything. The other two on my team just don't want to give anything up that they're working on so I can get more experience.

I love working with Salesforce, and have heard that the market for Salesforce admins is pretty good right now. I feel stuck though. I'm not sure if I really have enough SFDC experience to get a job somewhere else, and since the team won't give me more work, I'm not sure how to go about getting the experience I need. I mess around in our org when I can. Should I work on maybe getting certified? Just not sure where to go from here.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!