This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
If you’re a functional consultant or data analyst, or even a developer or solution architect, this is a very useful certification to have on your résumé and to help you earn the recognition that you deserve. In this post in our series on discovering your career path with Microsoft Power Platform certifications, we explore the benefits of achieving a Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate certification. Use this Microsoft Certification to validate the applicable skills you’ve worked so hard to hone—whether you’re just starting out, looking to advance, or wanting to change to a new, in-demand career. And we point out other certifications you can earn, depending on your career path.
If you’re hoping that certification can help you advance your career, you’re not alone. In fact, 61 percent of respondents in the Nigel Frank Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey believe that certifications give you an edge in the job market. In addition, a functional consultant certification from Microsoft is recognized worldwide, so you can let employers everywhere know that you have the skills they need.
The functional consultant role and certification
What does your workday look like? A typical day for a functional consultant might include gathering requirements for a Power Apps project and collaborating with solution architects, designers, and business stakeholders to understand and flesh out those requirements. As the project moves forward, functional consultants could be analyzing data, automating processes, creating and configuring application enhancements, building custom user experiences, creating virtual agents, or designing seamless integrations with third-party applications. Functional consultants iterate and incorporate feedback from the team to improve the product and add extensions as needed.
Does this sound like you? To qualify for this certification, you’re likely to be a functional consultant, a data analyst, a developer looking to hone your consulting and configuration skills, a solution architect, or an IT professional with knowledge and experience configuring Microsoft Power Platform. You can leverage your Dynamics 365 model-driven applications skills and data modeling principles. This certification lets the world know that you’re considered qualified to build and implement solutions that use Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents.
As a functional consultant, you can use this certification to market yourself more effectively for projects and other engagements. This certification lets organizations know that you can build solutions requiring no code or low code, which would normally require developer expertise.
Benefits of certification
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, certifications can demonstrate that you’re technically agile. It’s important to have a holistic understanding of several domains. In Benefits of Role-Based Certifications,[1] IDC reports that skilled IT professionals typically have multiple roles and that certifications based on their roles better prepare them for real-world responsibilities. The research demonstrates that professionals with a role-based certification perform on average 26 percent better than their colleagues without certifications.
The Global Knowledge 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report[2] notes that 87 percent of IT professionals have at least one certification, and nearly 40 percent are pursuing another one. To remain competitive and prove to employers that your skills are up to date, certification makes a lot of sense.
In addition to highlighting your specific technical skills, certification also indicates that you’re willing to put forth effort to learn new technologies to get ahead and stay ahead. Employers are building tech-intensive organizations where people have not only the necessary skills but also a willingness to embrace a culture of learning.
Other certifications for you
As you can see, there are many paths to the functional consultant certification. Depending on your path, you might consider several different Microsoft Certifications. Many IT professionals hold multiple certifications—they indicate a breadth of knowledge and skills.
If you haven’t gotten the fundamentals certification yet, consider adding it to your portfolio. The Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Fundamentals certification proves your basic skills across Microsoft Power Platform. It highlights your familiarity with computer technology, data analytics, cloud computing, and the internet.
People who become functional consultants are flexible technical experts who love creating, building, and extending applications, and they understand the value of collaborative work between business and technology. As you’ve seen, there is more than one path to this role. However, if you aren’t far enough along to be ready for certification, there are several things you can do to prepare. Here are some suggestions:
Work on a Microsoft Power Platform or Dynamics 365 model-driven app implementation project.
Shadow a functional consultant or a solution architect who works with Power Apps.
Build a basic productivity app using Power Apps.
Create a basic productivity flow using Power Automate.
To plan out your path, follow the sequence on the Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate journey map. Start by deciding whether this certification is a good fit for you.
Next, choose the training you’ll need to be prepared. To understand what you’ll be measured on when taking the exam, review the Exam PL-200 skills outline guide on the exam page. Then sign up for the training that fits your learning style and experience:
On the certification page, choose curated learning paths and modules for Microsoft Power Platform on Microsoft Learn. Explore hours of free, self-paced online learning to help you get ready.
After you pass the exam and earn your certification, you can continue to broaden your technical expertise by taking one of the other certifications described in this blog post or by exploring other certification offerings. Consider our intermediate and advanced certifications when you achieve the next milestones on your career journey. Map out the possibilities with Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 certification paths.
Where’s my community?
Join a community to network with other functional consultants, share ideas, and ask questions. You can also find news about Microsoft events and learning opportunities.
Celebrate with the world: Post your badge on LinkedIn
When you earn a certification or learn a new skill, it’s an accomplishment worth celebrating with your network. It often takes less than a minute to update your LinkedIn profile and share your achievements, highlight your skills, and help boost your career potential. Here’s how:
If you’ve earned a certification already, follow the instructions in the congratulations email you received. Or find your badge on your Certification Dashboard, and follow the instructions there to share it. (You’ll be transferred to the Acclaim website.)
To add specific skills, visit your LinkedIn profile and update the Skills and endorsements section. Tip: We recommend that you choose skills listed in the skills outline guide for your certification.
Plus, effective June 2021, a certification is valid for one year from the date you earned it. This shift aligns with the rapid evolution of cloud technology and skills. Get more information in our blog post Is your certification expiring soon? Renew it for free today!
Ready to discover your career path?
You’re a skilled technical professional. Are you ready to explore where Microsoft Certification can take you? See how a functional consultant certification can highlight your skills, as you innovate, turn good ideas into great solutions, and take the next steps on your Microsoft Power Platform career path.
There are 16 million developers in the world today. Roughly half of those, 8 million are web developers. Web development is therefore a good skill to have as you are looking to land that first job and build a career in tech. But where do you begin to learn all that? With this path
It covers everything from HTML, CSS, JavaScript to Accessibility.
Intro to programming
What even is programming? Well, it’s a way to instruct your machine to do things for you. By running statements, you can things like creating a web a page, a simple script or why not a computer game. The possibilities are endless. You do need some kind of text editor to type it all in, we provide that to in this first module.
Not everyone has perfect eyesight or see the colors you do or can even see at all. As a developer you need to realize that when you build programs, you should include everyone. There are specific tags and approaches you can use to make your app usable by anyone, regardless of disability. Be inclusive and build better apps.
One of the most popular programming languages right now is JavaScript. JavaScript can be used in the browser to create an interactive experience, but it can also be used on the backend to create APIs, application that can talk to other services and even databases. Learn how to think in programming by being introduced to the concept of variables and data types.
When you start out, you might have all your code statements in one file. But there is a way to organize your code so it can be made more readable but also reusable. What you can do is to create named areas, functions, which can be called whenever you need them to carry out a task for you.
Your code can execute differently depending on the values of different variables or some other condition. Having that flexibility makes your application useful in many different scenarios. Learn about IF, ELSE and much more.
Sometimes your data takes on the form of a list. Imagining a recipe, or an ice cream menu or why not a receipt of things. Lists make it possible to store more than one thing and there are constructs that make it possible to operate on lists and get what you need from them such as their sum, or maybe the highest value and so on.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
It is our very great pleasure to announce the release of a new, free, MIT-licensed open-source curriculum all about classic Machine Learning:Machine Learning for Beginners. Brought to you by a team of Azure Cloud Advocates and Program Managers, we hope to empower students of all ages to learn the basics of ML. Presuming no knowledge of ML, we offer a free 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum, plus a bonus ‘postscript’ lesson to help you dive into this amazing field.
Travel around the world in this themed semester-long self-study course as we look at ML topics through the lens of world cultures.
Our curricula are structured with a modified Project-Based pedagogy and include:
a pre-lesson warmup quiz
a written lesson
video
knowledge checks
a project to build
infographics, sketchnotes, and visuals
a challenge
an assignment
a post-lesson quiz
a ‘PAT’ (see below)
opportunities to deepen your knowledge on Microsoft Learn
Meet the team!
What will you learn?
The lessons are grouped so that you can deep-dive into various important aspects of classic ML. We start with anintroductionto ML concepts, moving to itshistory, concepts offairnessin machine learning, and discussing the tools andtechniquesof the trade. We then move on toRegression,Classification,Clustering,Natural Language Processing,Time Series Forecasting,Reinforcement Learning, with two‘applied’lessons demonstrating how to use your models within web apps for inference. We end with a ‘postscript’ lesson listing“real-world” applicationsof ML, showing how these techniques are used “in the wild”.
To make it easy for new learners to get started with ML, we built the content so that it can be used offline and so that the exercises can be completed using .ipynb notebooks within Visual Studio Code. Grab your datasets and let’s go!
This curriculum is all about “classic Machine Learning”, so we tackle these basic concepts for the most part usingScikit-learn, a library that helps demystify and explain these concepts. We don’t discuss deep learning or neural networks in this ML curriculum, but please stay tuned as we release our AI for Beginners curriculum this Fall!
Travel with us to discover North American pumpkin market pricing (Regression), Pan-Asian cuisines (Classification), Nigerian musical tastes (Clustering), European Hotel Reviews (NLP), World electricity usage (Time Series) and the Russian story about Peter and the Wolf (Reinforcement Learning).
How to use this curriculum: meet PAT
This is a self-study course, but it works well in groups so consider finding study buddies and learning together. Warm up with a pre-lesson low-stakes quiz and work through the lessons and assignments together or solo. Test your knowledge with the post-lesson quiz.
New for this curriculum is the use ofProgress Assessment Toolsin the Discussion Board area. Once done with a lesson group, visit the Discussion Board and copy the template to a new Discussion using the “quote reply”. Fill in your learnings in the self-reflection box and respond to other students in the repo. Let’s learn together!
We are also open to PRs and Issue raising, following our Code of Conduct and templating systems. We hope the community will chip in with translations of the lessons, quizzes and assignments. Thank you for participating as we learn together.
A sneak peek
This curriculum is filled with a lot of art, created by our team. Take a look at this cool sketchnote created by@girlie_mac.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
It is our very great pleasure to announce the release of a new, free, MIT-licensed open-source curriculum all about classic Machine Learning:Machine Learning for Beginners. Brought to you by a team of Azure Cloud Advocates and Program Managers, we hope to empower students of all ages to learn the basics of ML. Presuming no knowledge of ML, we offer a free 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum, plus a bonus ‘postscript’ lesson to help you dive into this amazing field.
Travel around the world in this themed semester-long self-study course as we look at ML topics through the lens of world cultures.
Our curricula are structured with a modified Project-Based pedagogy and include:
a pre-lesson warmup quiz
a written lesson
video
knowledge checks
a project to build
infographics, sketchnotes, and visuals
a challenge
an assignment
a post-lesson quiz
a ‘PAT’ (see below)
opportunities to deepen your knowledge on Microsoft Learn
Meet the team!
What will you learn?
The lessons are grouped so that you can deep-dive into various important aspects of classic ML. We start with anintroductionto ML concepts, moving to itshistory, concepts offairnessin machine learning, and discussing the tools andtechniquesof the trade. We then move on toRegression,Classification,Clustering,Natural Language Processing,Time Series Forecasting,Reinforcement Learning, with two‘applied’lessons demonstrating how to use your models within web apps for inference. We end with a ‘postscript’ lesson listing“real-world” applicationsof ML, showing how these techniques are used “in the wild”.
To make it easy for new learners to get started with ML, we built the content so that it can be used offline and so that the exercises can be completed using .ipynb notebooks within Visual Studio Code. Grab your datasets and let’s go!
This curriculum is all about “classic Machine Learning”, so we tackle these basic concepts for the most part usingScikit-learn, a library that helps demystify and explain these concepts. We don’t discuss deep learning or neural networks in this ML curriculum, but please stay tuned as we release our AI for Beginners curriculum this Fall!
Travel with us to discover North American pumpkin market pricing (Regression), Pan-Asian cuisines (Classification), Nigerian musical tastes (Clustering), European Hotel Reviews (NLP), World electricity usage (Time Series) and the Russian story about Peter and the Wolf (Reinforcement Learning).
How to use this curriculum: meet PAT
This is a self-study course, but it works well in groups so consider finding study buddies and learning together. Warm up with a pre-lesson low-stakes quiz and work through the lessons and assignments together or solo. Test your knowledge with the post-lesson quiz.
New for this curriculum is the use ofProgress Assessment Toolsin the Discussion Board area. Once done with a lesson group, visit the Discussion Board and copy the template to a new Discussion using the “quote reply”. Fill in your learnings in the self-reflection box and respond to other students in the repo. Let’s learn together!
We are also open to PRs and Issue raising, following our Code of Conduct and templating systems. We hope the community will chip in with translations of the lessons, quizzes and assignments. Thank you for participating as we learn together.
A sneak peek
This curriculum is filled with a lot of art, created by our team. Take a look at this cool sketchnote created by@girlie_mac.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
It is our very great pleasure to announce the release of a new, free, MIT-licensed open-source curriculum all about classic Machine Learning:Machine Learning for Beginners. Brought to you by a team of Azure Cloud Advocates and Program Managers, we hope to empower students of all ages to learn the basics of ML. Presuming no knowledge of ML, we offer a free 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum, plus a bonus ‘postscript’ lesson to help you dive into this amazing field.
:globe_showing_americas: Travel around the world in this themed semester-long self-study course as we look at ML topics through the lens of world cultures. :globe_showing_americas:
Our curricula are structured with a modified Project-Based pedagogy and include:
a pre-lesson warmup quiz
a written lesson
video
knowledge checks
a project to build
infographics, sketchnotes, and visuals
a challenge
an assignment
a post-lesson quiz
a ‘PAT’ (see below)
opportunities to deepen your knowledge on Microsoft Learn
Meet the team!
What will you learn?
The lessons are grouped so that you can deep-dive into various important aspects of classic ML. We start with anintroductionto ML concepts, moving to itshistory, concepts offairnessin machine learning, and discussing the tools andtechniquesof the trade. We then move on toRegression,Classification,Clustering,Natural Language Processing,Time Series Forecasting,Reinforcement Learning, with two‘applied’lessons demonstrating how to use your models within web apps for inference. We end with a ‘postscript’ lesson listing“real-world” applicationsof ML, showing how these techniques are used “in the wild”.
To make it easy for new learners to get started with ML, we built the content so that it can be used offline and so that the exercises can be completed using .ipynb notebooks within Visual Studio Code. Grab your datasets and let’s go!
This curriculum is all about “classic Machine Learning”, so we tackle these basic concepts for the most part usingScikit-learn, a library that helps demystify and explain these concepts. We don’t discuss deep learning or neural networks in this ML curriculum, but please stay tuned as we release our AI for Beginners curriculum this Fall!
Travel with us to discover North American pumpkin market pricing (:jack_o_lantern: Regression), Pan-Asian cuisines (:steaming_bowl: Classification), Nigerian musical tastes (:musical_notes: Clustering), European Hotel Reviews (:hotel: NLP), World electricity usage (:high_voltage:️ Time Series) and the Russian story about Peter and the Wolf (:wolf_face: Reinforcement Learning).
How to use this curriculum: meet PAT
This is a self-study course, but it works well in groups so consider finding study buddies and learning together. Warm up with a pre-lesson low-stakes quiz and work through the lessons and assignments together or solo. Test your knowledge with the post-lesson quiz.
New for this curriculum is the use ofProgress Assessment Toolsin the Discussion Board area. Once done with a lesson group, visit the Discussion Board and copy the template to a new Discussion using the “quote reply”. Fill in your learnings in the self-reflection box and respond to other students in the repo. Let’s learn together!
We are also open to PRs and Issue raising, following our Code of Conduct and templating systems. We hope the community will chip in with translations of the lessons, quizzes and assignments. Thank you for participating as we learn together.
A sneak peek
This curriculum is filled with a lot of art, created by our team. Take a look at this cool sketchnote created by@girlie_mac.
Recent Comments