Passing Microsoft Certifications with look, cover, write check!

In this particular section, I'd like to discuss how I've approached studying for the Microsoft Certifications I've passed and renewed during my career. What I write here will only refer to my take on the exams I've passed, and may not necessarily hold true for other examinations.

I personally find reading many pages of Microsoft Docs to be long and tedious, especially when the navigation is counter intuitive and the material is not easily grouped or categorised into which apps, products or exam content they belong to.

At school, I did quite well at my GCSEs, with no grade being less than an A. This was mostly down to the way we were taught, especially in our science classes. I was told that if I memorise the textbook, I can pass, as nothing would be asked outside of what was in that textbook. Surprisingly, they were right, and I passed some of my science exams with 100%. A levels however, did not quite work like this sadly. I find that learning lots of stuff and then not being tested on it, to be very frustrating.

Moving on to how this relates to Microsoft exams, the material in the exams must be written somewhere in Microsoft Docs and in Microsoft Learn. Therefore, in theory, you could make a textbook out of this to learn from right? My thinking is yes, but it would be a lot of work for a one time reward?

It actually took me 2 years to get my first exam on Dynamics 365/Power Platform, which was the PL-200, as both my company and myself paid for me to go onto courses, paid for practice examinations and questions from different companies, such as MeasureUp and Udemy, but in reality, in my first few attempts, I came close to the pass mark, but never quite enough. I thought this was partly due to the fact that I did not work with tools such as AI Builder, or Power Virtual Agent chatbots in my day to day work.

What finally allowed me to pass, with a score high beyond the bottom pass mark I may add (which is also no different from achieving 70%), was the fact that I began to use Microsoft Learns' "Practice Assessments". I couldn't believe I didn't know about this before, or perhaps it was a new thing by then. Either way, this tool is absolutely brilliant giving you 50 example questions chosen at random from its total pool. I found that I could actually just memorise these questions and make sure I understood why the answer was what it was and the context around the question. When I actually took the exam, I was delighted to discover that the majority of the exam contained some of the same, and some very similar questions to what was in the practice exam - I would say about 70 to 80% of the questions.

Benefits of using practice assessments in Microsoft Learn

There are many reasons why this way of learning the exam is so incredible compared to other services providing this kind of material:

• It's actually written by Microsoft, to whom the exams you will be taking belong to, therefore the questions are the most similar in style and content to the material you will actually be questioned on during the exam. This gives you an advantage, especially as the content is kept up to date with the current exam.

• It allows you to "Check Answer" there and then, where it gives an explanation for whether you were right or wrong, and why, with links to the Microsoft Docs that have the written answer there.

• These Microsoft Docs links give you all the information you could be asked about, and link to related stuff around that to which you should also probably take the time to read and learn. This significantly narrows down the searching, learning and reading time for the docs pages need, as it links you directly to the most relevant ones.

• The explanation also often chides you for not reading the question, teaching you exam technique.

• The more you do these types of questions, you will realise that the exam scenarios, at least in my experience, are not the way you might approach a solution in real life, they have been fabricated to test one your understanding of a single fact, such as that a classic workflow can be synchronous, whereas a power automate flow can only run asynchronously. This is because the exams are limited to multiple choice questions and in this way, there is only so much you can be asked.

When you look at an examination on Microsoft Learn, for example the PL-200, it will even say in the section about practicing for the exam, that you should aim to achieve a score of 80% or more in multiple attempts before taking the exam. I actually find this to be a very accurate measure of competency in at least my ability to be able to take the test.

How I tackle a new exam now

My approach to learning a new exam is to begin with the practice exam, and learn the relevant material in this way. I might start by getting 50% of the questions correct in 2 to 3 hours time - this is because for every question, if I am unsure of why exactly the answer was the option I chose, or even why an option I did not chose was not correct, I look at the explanation and the relevant Microsoft Docs/Learn links provided and learn it for some context and better understanding. As I take more tests, both my speed and score become better. I always make sure that I remember to identify the key parts of the question, the correct answer, and the explanation for why it was not the other answers as I go.

I find that in repeatedly taking the practice exams, there comes a point where I have seen and memorised the answer to every question in the pool of practice questions and can almost get 100% every time within 20 minutes.

At this point, I know that I am ready to take the exam - especially due to the new nature of the intermediate and above exams providing open book capability to Microsoft Learn since 2023.

Through this method, I can actually learn a fundamentals or intermediate level exam very quickly and cheaply comparatively, within 10-20 hours total study time if it's in a field I know and work with, and perhaps extending to 30-40 hours if it's in a field I do not work in every day; this is, learn it to a level where I feel confident to attempt and pass the exam.

Open book exams

This sounds great for people who want to get those certifications under their belts and use them as spit polish for their CVs. And it is. But you do need to have a good idea how to search for the correct Microsoft Docs and use the search engine there with the correct key words.

I did actually take one of my intermediate exams with only a few attempts at the practice exam, relying on the fact that Microsoft Learn was available during the exam. I did pass with a reasonable margin, and it took me nearly the whole time frame of the exam. Searching that labyrinth of documents can be frustrating and long! To check every answer specifically is difficult if your searches are inefficient and unable to scan read documents, you will find yourself with far less time.

One thing I do want to point out from my experience, is that for intermediate exams, I haven't come across a question that you cannot find an answer to using Microsoft Learn unless it is a question asking you something like: "which type of automation would you use to send emails from a record".

This is not true for expert exams. Now I've only taken one - the Power Platform Solution Architect exam, which I will proudly say I passed with nearly 90% on. The practice assessment on this was actually brilliant - and it helped me to learn lots, giving context to my own work at the company I was with at the time. I would not have passed if I had not learned about ALM and other "architectural" considerations from my boss at the time, as this allowed me to understand the concepts far more easily than if I had tried to learn it without quality industry experience. There were definitely questions I was not entirely sure about, such as the Azure DevOps Pipelines questions, as my company did not use those at the time, however - and you can correct me if I'm wrong - I could not find the answers or explanations for this kind of content in Microsoft Learn/Docs; what is available, I found unhelpfully vague, especially as I come from a non-coding background. In fact when I was learning about this particular topic - Azure DevOps Pipelines (and a few other topics), I had to learn it through watching videos on YouTube, which were also far and few between.

In summary, you cannot rely on Microsoft Learn helping you too much with that exam. I would say it can help with 40 - 50% of the exam.

Our old favourite: Microsoft's continuously changing landscape

Now as Microsoft introduce new and deprecate old exams, the exams come out without practice exams having been made for them yet. This means (as of this time October 2024) for example, D365 Customer Insights - Journeys/Data don't have practice assessments to learn via this method right now - calamity!

My solution to this at the moment, is to focus on the exams I haven't yet passed that do have practice assessments ready to go, and hope by the time I need to focus on these exams, there will be a practice assessment ready, otherwise it's back to the old methods.

Microsoft's exam levels

I think that each level exam is actually accurate in the level of knowledge that it tests for - beginner, intermediate and expert. It actually reflects project design documentation nicely, with beginner being equivalent to a "high-level design" document and subsequent difficulties becoming more detailed.

Now, in reality, most professionals in this area will pass fundamentals exams within a year of working, intermediate exams within 2-3 years and expert exams after 5 or more years of working.

However, if you are keen, driven, always trying to learn and you have good colleagues and mentors in your company, and if you learn the exam technique in this way, I think that you could actually achieve the following:

I think that most people could actually pass at least the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 fundamentals exams without requiring industry experience (I know this to be true, because I have actually mentored 2 individuals to be able to do this within the span of a month or two studying for it).

I think that only a minimum of about 3-4 months industry experience is required to pass the intermediate exams, however a dedicated self learner could pass some of them without industry experience.

I think that a person could pass the expert exam with a minimum of a year's industry experience.

How relevant Microsoft exams are to technical/functional expertise and the actual job you do

I do not actually think that these exams test your ability to be a consultant, or how well you can actually do that job, despite most of the exams calling themselves "functional consultant associate" exams.

I do however think, from my limited experience on the subject, that the more technical exams such as the PL-400 and the PL-300 do actually test more relevant stuff. The PL-400 does not exactly test your ability to code, but more tests your ability to implement your code within Dynamics, which is actually quite important.

Being a functional consultant involves gathering and identifying requirements, analysing those requirements and either implementing them through designing a best fit solution or consulting to change how the design should work to achieve the client's goal better.

There are maybe 2 or 3 questions that actually ask you anything like this. For me, the actual exam is wrote memorising facts or concepts that some may refer to as "exam knowledge"; for example, the maximum number of entities a business process flow may span over is 5. Knowing this information only tests that you know this limit, or that you know what the Dynamics 365 toolkit can help you to build. What it does not test, is your ability to design a solution or solve business problems with the best fitting automation or IT solution. It implies that you could tell your client, who has requested a single business process flow should span all 10 entities he wants to partition his new CRM system into, that he can't do this.

My experience so far, is that those professional who actually do know their stuff, understand this, and would agree with myself, that the exams do test that you have a certain amount of knowledge about the product and do prove that you know at least enough to customise and consult basically on that product. But in reality your expertise doing the job will come from your industry experience, your time on different projects and your role within those projects.

Despite all this, companies hiring Power Platform/Dynamics 365 CRM professionals do like Microsoft Certifications on your CV. Aside from proving you have that level of knowledge at least, it gets them those shiny Microsoft Partner points!