Which Power Apps certification exam should I do first? (PL-900 vs PL-100)

this video is all about how to get certified in power platform i'm going to take you through the exams from beginner to advanced what you can expect from each of them what kinds of questions you're likely to be asked and then i'm going to take you through the resources that are available to help you prepare including free resources available on microsoft learn how to set up a collection there and track your learning progress so let's have a look at the exams that are available to you to get certified in power platform from beginner through to

advanced power platform fundamentals is a really really good foundational starting point this one is designed for proving that you can describe the business value of power platform what is power apps power automate power virtual agents power bi when would you use each how would you recommend different solutions to be built this one is perfect for people who are in like a sales or business development role it's not necessarily designed for people who are hands on with the product this is more about being able to describe the components and their business value but i think it's

a really good one to do as a foundation level if you are brand new to power platform and you want to get your head around the concepts this is absolutely the place to start the most popular one i think pl 100 which is the app maker exam is designed as the entry-level exam for people who are hands-on building applications now beware here that app maker uses the word app in the broadest sense of the word in the platform this is not just canvas apps it's not just that kind of app maker this is apps in

the sense of solutions with power platform applications that might use flow power virtual agents power bi model driven apps as well so you will need to know about dataverse so this one actually gets you across the full breadth of making solutions hands-on making solutions with power platform at that 100 level this is a really really awesome exam it's not an easy one even though it sits at that sort of associate level highly recommended if this is something that you want to get into either as part of your job or to turn this into your job

to become somebody who hands on makes apps that's what this one is designed for the next one up here which is the functional consultant level so at this point this would be your full-time job you would be advising others you'd be consulting you'd be building solutions for others so this takes up a lot of the same skills we saw in the pl 100 app maker but also adds quite a lot of information about the platform itself about security roles about tenants environment solutions and things like that so you actually have to know how to kind

of build and deploy a solution it's also starting to test your skill set here in requirements gathering and things as well which is not part of that 100 level exam now you can do these in sequence it's actually quite a nice sequence because there is some overlap so pl 100 app maker if you want to be someone who's hands-on making apps and pl 200 functional consultant if you're looking to or if you do have a role as a consultant and rounding out our series of associate exams here we have the pl 400 exam which is

really for professional developers this is not a low code exam this one is actually covering some of using using code and plugins and things so you will need to have some knowledge of that in order to go for that one and then we have an advanced level expert level exam which is the solution architect exam this one requires a much broader and deeper knowledge this is for people who are designing solutions on the platform it includes knowledge of the azure cloud in there as well so this is a much bigger one for people who are

in that solution architect type of role so what kinds of questions can you expect now i'm going to say up front here if you're here looking for an exam dump or a giveaway of content on the exam i'm not allowed to do that and you should not be getting those things that's not what i'm going to do here but what i can do is give you some guidance on the types of questions that you're likely to get in the exams i think that's helpful just to kind of know what you're going into so you'll find

a lot of multiple choice questions this will make up the bulk of the exam and certainly at the pl 900 exam this is most of what's going on there and multiple choice questions can come in a couple of different formats one of them is the you know which is the correct answer from this list and the other one is which of the following two statements are true or which of the following three things would make up your proposed solution these are always couched in a case study scenario type of thing now when i say a

case study this is very lightweight it's like a scenario that could be one or two sentences or a short paragraph typically like you are a sales manager at company abc and you want to be able to do the following which is true you are a consultant working with organization xyz and they want to achieve these particular outcomes what is going to make up your solution which of the following are true so you get a little statement there that gives you some scenario and then you're answering the question in the context of that scenario then you

have questions which are match the solution to the problem statement so this could be things like this also has a scenario can be a little bit more information or the same and then it'll say here are the different problem statements and you have to kind of drag and drop from the left hand side of the screen oh that one is powerapps that one's power automate or in the more detailed higher level exams those things become more granular so you'll get different options down the side and you have to kind of match them up they can

be more they can be used more than once it's not a matter of kind of process of elimination so you're dragging and dropping those things in there and there are also questions like that which have a drop down menu so choose the correct solution or the correct component from the drop down list of options there's another type of question which appears in some of the um higher level exams which is around is this the correct solution to solve the problem now beware of these ones you can't go back over your answers they'll come in like

a set where they'll say here is the problem statement so a bit like that scenario with a bit more detail you want to achieve these things in this scenario is this a valid solution to the problem and it will describe a solution you know you're going to use power virtual agents blah blah is this is this a valid solution yes or no and you have to choose yes or no and then it repeats the same scenario and gives you a another option a different option is this a correct solution yes or no and so on

these are in a set of two or three questions around the same scenario being repeated and you can't go back because if you get to the third one and go oh no that's actually correct and the first one wasn't you can't go back and change your mind so that's a set of questions that you have to tackle in in that way and you can't go back and last but certainly not least are the case studies now you'll find these get harder as you go along the along the exam paths this is the primary way that

the exams are testing your ability to do things like fit gap analysis and requirements gathering and things like that so it's giving you a full case study you'll find a menu down the left hand side that has things like here's the scenario here's the current technical landscape here are the requirements from these five departments here are the technical issues you're having as a consultant deploying these things and then you'll get a series of usually four or five questions related to that case study and again those are multiple choice drag and drop type things but you

have to be able to digest a lot of information and flick back and forth and understand what's going on there in order to answer those i find those are the things that are the most time-consuming and challenging of all of the exams i've done so deep breath and take your time when you get to those case studies the case studies are also boxed as a separate section of the exam so once you've done each case study you can't go back and and do that part again so the case studies and the other types of questions

are sort of treated as two separate components of the exam the length of the exams differ the fundamentals one is much shorter than the solution architect one i have found that my knowledge runs out before my time runs out at some point you either know the answers or you don't sometimes you can figure them out the case studies certainly the things that take up the most time but you'll find that there's usually plenty of time allowed in the exam for you to get out whatever knowledge it is that you have in your head now the

first thing you want to do in preparation is make sure you have access to a trial i've got a video here on how to sign up for a community plan if you don't already have a trial but make sure you get one very very worthwhile having hands-on experience as you work through the learning materials and here are our learning materials microsoft learn this is a platform full of free learning materials all of these things are aligned to the exams and this is honestly your best way to prepare i often get people asking me what resources

are available to prepare i'll pop some links in the description here to the various certification pathways that i've prepared for these exams if you want to follow through and save yourself having to build them so here's how we do this easy aka ms forward slash learn will take you to microsoft learn i highly recommend that you set up an account and sign in because then you can use these collections and save your progress against them and if you like me and you like getting some extra little badges and trophies along the way which you could

also share if you want to to as you make progress then that's all part of it so let me show you what's going on here firstly going to go to this sign-in screen and you can use your work or email address here once you get into this you can start creating collections so this is going to take us through an experience of being able to browse the different modules and certifications and things in here so let's say i can go in here to certifications and let's browse certifications and if i know the one i want

i can put in pl 100 let's say i'm doing that app maker certification and we can just go straight into that now this is a really important page this actually takes you through the exam syllabus for the app for the exam and it's always worth checking this especially if you're using resources and videos and things that other people have prepared because they do update these exams from time to time and you want to make sure that you've got the right stuff here so if we go through this takes you through all the stuff to schedule

exams that's a whole other topic but from here you can download the skills outline and that will give you in much more detail than those summary things there what's being measured so here are the learning paths then that go with microsoft learn that you need to do in order to complete this and what i'm going to do is create a collection so that i have to go back and find this every time i've got it ready to go and i can just tick my progress against those things so i can go into here click add

i can create a new collection and we'll call this pl 100 because this is for my certification and submit that and then that one is now going to go into there and i can go through and add all of these other learning paths in here as well and build that up now just be careful show more sometimes there's more on there just make sure you're getting all of those things and it is also worth just cross-checking the exam syllabus against what's in the learning path sometimes there are new things that haven't been added to the

learning path or check out in the description for my recommended learning paths for these exams once you've got your collection set up you can access it at any time through your profile i'm just going to go back to the main learn menu here because you saw we browsed into that certification description i can go into my profile here and i can go into collections and you'll see there's the one that i just created and it will give me a percentage complete and show my progress as i go through what you'll find inside the microsoft learn

modules is a range of different learning materials typically a nice structure here that takes you through different lessons and things we can get started here you're reading through things sometimes there are videos sometimes there are some labs that you can do and then at the end of each section it will take you through a knowledge check which allows you to this one's got some exercise in it that's what i was talking about before so it'll take you through a knowledge check at the end and you're clocking up experience points as you work through this and

it will give you a completed check once you've done that knowledge check you can actually do the knowledge check more than once until you get it right it's not actually an exam also the knowledge check questions are not representative of what you get in the exam so there you go i would recommend that you start with either pl 900 or pl 100 if you're new to this 900 being that foundation fundamentals level that's going to get you across all of those core concepts and pl 100 being that first level of app maker a fair bit

more work in that one but if you really want to be making apps that's the place to start i hope that's been helpful thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe i've got lots of tutorials tips tricks here on all aspects of power platform to help you out on your learning journey