Harnessing the Power of Microsoft’s Power Platform

The Power Platform from Microsoft is the low-code platform that spans Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and standalone applications. This platform allows organizations and individuals to automate and transform tasks and processes, build solutions, analyze data, and create virtual agents.

Learn how one connected platform empowers everyone to innovate.

What is Microsoft Power Platform?

Developed by Microsoft, the Power Platform is a collection of applications for business intelligence, app development, and app connectivity. The Power Platform uses Microsoft’s Power Fx low-code language to express logic. It also integrates with GitHub and Microsoft Teams.

What are the Parts Power Platform?

Power Platform is composed of four elements: automating processes (Power Automate), creating apps to simplify processes and tasks (Power Apps), analyzing data and maximizing its value (Power BI), and creating powerful virtual agents that automatically perform tasks or perform action when appropriate (Power Virtual Agents).

Power BI: Business Analytics

• Data is centralized and consolidated for a comprehensive view across the organization
• Ability to build interactive reports and dashboards that can be consumed online and across mobile devices based on ad-hoc analysis, live dashboards and live data.
• Build smart applications that use data insights to drive action

Power Apps: Application Development

• Develop highly customized task- and role-based canvas apps from individual or multiple sources of data
• Create immersive model-driven apps for the organization based on data model and business processes
• On any device, use fully accessible apps across web and mobile, embedded or standalone

Power Automate: Process Automation

• Streamline and automate business processes across all apps and services.
• Automations ranging from simple branches and loops to more complex scenarios.
• Receive alerts, approve actions, and receive approvals directly from your workspace.
• Automation of legacy, on-premises, and cloud applications and services.

Power Virtual Agents: Intelligent Virtual Agents

• Using a no-code graphical interface, an organization can build powerful virtual agents without needing to hire data scientists or software developers.
• Provide the virtual agent with authority to take action on behalf of customers. Create custom workflows for your virtual agent or easily integrate it with many services and workflows.
• Using conversational metrics and dashboards, monitor how virtual agent are performing while improving bot performance with in-depth AI insights.

Roles in Power Platform

With the right IT training and Microsoft certifications, a successful career in Power Platform can easily be accomplished. Power Platform roles are expected to increase in demand by 31% over the next five years. In addition to salaries ranging from $80,000 to $165,500, a career in Power Platform is a great investment for your IT career.

Power Platform Fundamentals:

Those in the fundamentals role aspire to improve productivity by understanding and using the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform.

Power Platform App Maker:

The App Maker builds solutions to simplify, automate, and transform tasks and processes for themselves and their team where they have deep expertise in the solution business domain. They have basic data modeling, user experience design, requirements analysis, and process analysis skills. The App Maker creates and enforces business processes, structures digital collection of information, improves efficiency of repeatable tasks, and automates business processes.

Power Platform Functional Consultant:

A Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant is responsible for creating and configuring apps, automations, and solutions. They act as the liaison between users and the implementation team. The functional consultant promotes utilization of solutions within an organization. The functional consultant may perform discovery, engage subject matter experts and stakeholders, capture requirements, and map requirements to features. They implement components of a solution including application enhancements, custom user experiences, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and simple visualizations.

Power Platform Developer:

Power Platform Developers design, develop, secure, and troubleshoot Power Platform solutions. They implement components of the solution that include application enhancements, custom user experience, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.

Data Analyst:

Data Analysts help businesses to maximize the value of their data assets using Microsoft Power BI.

Power Platform Solution Architect:

Solution architects for Power Platform lead successful implementations and focus on how solutions address the broader business and technical needs of organizations.

How to get Trained and Certified:

The first step in a successful career path is to get the appropriate training, which applies to software engineers, database administrators, data scientists and analysts, architects, or those new to IT.

TechSherpas 365 offers a robust course schedule and flexible training delivery options to ensure you can get the training you need in Power Platform. Contact us to learn more!

Become an Expert in the Cloud with Microsoft

Learn how to build the right skills on Azure not only to enhance your digital transformation, but also to identify the right certifications to meet the tasks you have at hand, or those that you anticipate undertaking in the future.

The Digital Transformation Embraced with Azure

In the current era of digital transformation, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. If you think about it as a journey – with incremental steps toward a long-term goal – it becomes much less intimidating. Digital transformation has brought significant benefits to organizations, including:

• Increased agility
• Products getting to market faster
• Improved efficiencies
• Lower costs

Microsoft Azure enables anyone—regardless of their background or company—to accomplish more and innovate more meaningfully. The challenge is to embrace new capabilities now and to invest in those yet to come.

How can Azure Certifications help you

If you haven’t looked at Azure in a while, you might be surprised to see what is available. Currently Azure offers more than 200 products and services to be utilized by organizations and individuals alike. An alarming statistic shows that 60% of IT decision-makers believe skills gaps cost their employees between three and eight hours per week. Imagine a whole day lost to every employee every week because they haven’t been trained in the skills they need

Azure certifications enable IT pros, developers, and data & AI professionals to validate that they have the necessary skills to cover all the aspects of your digital transformation—from managing on-premises, hybrid, or cloud infrastructure, to innovating with the best-in class applications. Reports show that role-based certifications improve IT professionals’ performance by 26% compared to their uncertified colleagues. This means they can help you ensure that your organization has the right talent.

Types of Certifications

The following certifications validate the skills that IT professionals need to develop, deploy, and manage on-premises, hybrid, or cloud infrastructure solutions. While the certificates we show here are geared towards IT professionals, you’ll see that several of them are nonetheless appropriate for other technical skillsets.

Fundamental Level

AI-900: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals: The Azure AI Fundamentals course is designed for anyone interested in learning about the types of solution artificial intelligence (AI) makes possible, and the services on Microsoft Azure that you can use to create them. You don’t need to have any experience of using Microsoft Azure before taking this course, but a basic level of familiarity with computer technology and the Internet is assumed. Some of the concepts covered in the course require a basic understanding of mathematics, such as the ability to interpret charts.

AZ-900: Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals: This course is suitable for IT personnel who are just beginning to work with Azure. This audience wants to learn about our offerings and get hands-on experience with the product. This course primarily uses the Azure portal to create services and does not require scripting skills. Students in this course will gain confidence to take other role-based courses and certifications, such as Azure Administrator.

DP-900: Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals: The audience for this course is individuals who want to learn the fundamentals of database concepts in a cloud environment, get basic skilling in cloud data services, and build their foundational knowledge of cloud data services within Microsoft Azure.

For IT pros

Azure Administrator: This certification is recommended for cloud administrators. This is a solid starting point for all IT pros, as all other certifications assume you have strong Azure administration knowledge and experience. Azure Administrators implement, manage, and monitors identity, governance, storage, compute, and virtual networks in a cloud environment. AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator

Azure for SAP workloads: This course is for Azure Administrators who migrate and manage SAP solutions on Azure. Azure Administrators manage the cloud services that span storage, networking, and compute cloud capabilities, with a deep understanding of each service across the full IT lifecycle. They take end-user requests for new cloud applications and make recommendations on services to use for optimal performance and scale, as well as provision, size, monitor and adjust as appropriate. AZ-120: Planning and Administering Microsoft Azure for SAP Workloads

Administrator for Azure Virtual Desktop: As a Windows Virtual Desktop administrator, you will work closely with the Azure Administrators and Architects, along with Microsoft 365 Administrators. Windows Virtual Desktop administrator responsibilities include planning, deploying, packaging, updating, and maintaining the Azure Windows Virtual Desktop infrastructure. AZ-140: Configuring and operating Windows Virtual Desktop on Microsoft Azure

Azure Solutions Architect: This course is for IT Professionals with expertise in designing and implementing solutions running on Microsoft Azure. They should have broad knowledge of IT operations, including networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data platform, budgeting, and governance. Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-303 & AZ-304)

DevOps Engineer: Students in this course are interested in designing and implementing DevOps processes or in passing the Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions certification exam. AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps solutions

Azure Security Engineer: All Azure certifications include a security component, but Azure Security Engineer Associate is a deep dive into security controls and threat protection. It’s all about identity and access, security across data, applications, hybrid and cloud networks, and end-to-end infrastructure. This certification is a nice complement to the Azure Administrator Associate certification. AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies

Azure Stack Hub operator: Students for AZ-600: Configuring and Operating a Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Azure Stack Hub are interested in becoming Azure Stack Hub operators who provide cloud services to end users or customers from within their own datacenter using Azure Stack Hub. AZ-600: Configuring and Operating a Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Azure Stack Hub

For Developers

Azure Developer: Developers will learn how to create end-to-end solutions in Microsoft Azure. Students will learn how to implement Azure compute solutions, create Azure Functions, implement and manage web apps, develop solutions utilizing Azure storage, implement authentication and authorization, and secure their solutions by using KeyVault and Managed Identities. AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure

Azure AI Engineer: Software engineers concerned with building, managing and deploying AI solutions that leverage Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and Microsoft Bot Framework. They are familiar with C# or Python and have knowledge on using REST-based APIs to build computer vision, language analysis, knowledge mining, intelligent search, and conversational AI solutions on Azure. AI-102: Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution

Azure IoT developer: The Azure IoT Developer is responsible for the implementation and the coding required to create and maintain the cloud and edge portion of an IoT solution. In addition to configuring and maintaining devices by using Azure IoT services and other Microsoft tools, the IoT Developer also sets up the physical devices and is responsible for maintaining the devices throughout the life cycle. The IoT Developer implements designs for IoT solutions, including device topology, connectivity, debugging and security. For Edge device scenarios, the IoT Developer also deploys compute/containers and configures device networking, which could include various edge gateway implementations. AZ-220: Microsoft Azure IoT Developer

Azure Solutions Architect: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-303 & AZ-304) (see above)

DevOps Engineer: AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps solutions (see above)

For Data & AI pros

Azure AI Engineer: AI-102: Designing and Implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution (see above)

Data Analyst: The audience for this course are data professionals and business intelligence professionals who want to learn how to accurately perform data analysis using Power BI. This course is also targeted toward those individuals who develop reports that visualize data from the data platform technologies that exist on both in the cloud and on-premises. DA-100: Analyzing Data with Power BI

Azure Data Scientist: This course is designed for data scientists with existing knowledge of Python and machine learning frameworks like Scikit-Learn, PyTorch, and Tensorflow, who want to build and operate machine learning solutions in the cloud. DP-100: Designing and Implementing a Data Science Solution on Azure

Azure Data Engineer: The primary audience for this course is data professionals, data architects, and business intelligence professionals who want to learn about data engineering and building analytical solutions using data platform technologies that exist on Microsoft Azure. DP-203: Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure

Azure Database Administrator: The audience for this course is data professionals managing data and databases who want to learn about administering the data platform technologies that are available on Microsoft Azure. This course is also valuable for data architects and application developers who need to understand what technologies are available for the data platform with Azure and how to work with those technologies through applications. DP-300: Administering Relational Databases on Microsoft Azure

Become Certified Today

In today’s cloud-based digital world, we’re dedicated to helping you and your team develop the skills you need. Learn how you can become certified in today’s hottest Azure technologies by contacting us.