Getting Started on Your Power Platform Learning Journey at Community Summit North America
Community Summit North America 2023 is just days away! As such, it’s time to prepare for some in-depth learning. This is going to be a great event with so many opportunities for networking, listening to educational sessions, meeting experts, and so much more. It is important to have a plan to be able to take in the information and take it back to your organization. In this post, we’ll review a few ways to prep for Community Summit North America and learn how you can get started with your Power Platform learning journey!
Take Notes
The first step to remembering this information is writing it down! I prefer to use OneNote to keep my notes organized and make sure I can search through them with ease. I remember things better if I handwrite, but I am much more likely to be able to find them if I am typing.
Just make sure you don’t get distracted on your computer! You still need to listen. Remember that the sessions are a great time to ask questions and get help from the speakers. These speakers came from all over the world to share their tips and would love to talk to you!
Top Takeaways
I encourage you to try to take at least one takeaway from each session. While you are taking notes, highlight items that will be especially valuable for your organization. You could also review your notes in the evening to find those particularly important items.
Also, take note of items that you need to spend more time learning. This can help form your plan for what to look at next.
Make an Action Plan
From these takeaways, you can make an action plan. This includes things for you personally to work on and items to implement in your organization. I like to mark these items with a check box in my notes or even copy them to a separate page.
At the end of the event, you should have a few lists of items:
- Research: Items that you want to investigate in your implementation. For example, make sure your users don’t have delete access if you attended my security session.
- Implement: Changes you heard about that are needed and you want to get on your roadmap. Try to put these in a priority order so you can implement the highest value first. This could be something like enabling and configuring Sales Sequences to guide your users through a process.
- Learn: Items you want to learn more about. I always find there is a new tool in the Power Platform that I don’t know much about and want to spin up a trial as soon as I am home.
Learn the Tools
Now that you have a plan, I want to talk a bit more about learning the tools.
There are so many resources available to help you be successful. Of course, you want to find the Microsoft Learn module for the tool you are looking at. These learning paths and modules have all the details about the tools as well as exercises for you to follow to really dive in. There is even sample content as needed for these builds.
There are also the “In a Day” materials. These are hands-on Labs that contain step-by-step information to start using a tool. Everything you need to build the solution is right there to help you keep moving on your learning journey.
Here are some of the “In a Day” packages available now:
- App in a Day: Build your first Canvas App! Finish it yourself then help someone else do it to see if you really know it. Next, try to do it again using the Power Apps Maker Copilot experience! This material gives you the basics of Power Apps, Power Fx, and even model-driven apps with Dataverse.
- Power Automate in a Day: Build your first Flow in Power Automate and learn all the basics of the tool.
- Dashboard in a day: Get started with Power BI. This teaches you about data modeling and transformation plus building charts and dashboards. It even talks about multiple types of visualizations to use on your reports.
- Power Virtual Agents in a Day: Learn how to build a bot that you can have a conversation with. Build out a few topics and understand the basics of the tool. Remember: copilot is coming here too so you can try it out and then you can try it with Copilot.
Book a Certification
The best way to seal your knowledge is to book a certification. It’s even better if you book it before you finish learning, so you have a goal to work towards. Look at your list of things to learn and find a certification that matches that topic. Then get to studying! You will feel so motivated after the conference, so I encourage you to use this to push you forward on your journey.
Community Summit North America 2023 is going to be an event jam-packed with learning opportunities. Let us know in the Discussion Forum what you are most excited to learn!
