It’d been years since my previous Microsoft exam so now I thought it’d be a good time to take a shot for it! Without hesitation, I scheduled a Pearson Vue online proctored exam for PL-900.
Let’s just say that it didn’t go as expected at the very beginning. See, I got mixed up by the 12-hour clock they were using on their scheduling system and accidentally booked the time for the exam to be at 1:30 AM while the intention was to have it at 1:30 PM. So there I was sitting at my laptop with my passport ready on the exam day in the afternoon and wondering why oh why can’t I start the exam already…
All’s well that ends well, I was able to reschedule the exam for the next day after having a 45 min chat with Pearson Vue agent (most of it waiting)
So, I finally got to start my exam. Having an online proctored exam is an interesting experience if you’ve never done it before – just book half an hour extra time before the exam to get things ready 😉
I did not study for the exam at all, I was counting on my couple of years of experience on Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, CDS and on the few demos I had implemented with Power Virtual Agents, AI Builder, and Power Apps Portals. I had almost zero experience on model-driven apps, however, and that was obvious also in the test results: Power Apps was my weakest category although I was expecting it to be my strongest.
I got 822 points and passed the exam and here are my tips for you to do the same. Before you take the exam, I would recommend doing the following hands-on activities:
- Create a canvas app, publish and share it
- Create a model-driven app, add some views, etc., publish and share it
- Create a Power BI report (no matter what data source, use e.g. Excel) and publish it to a workspace
- Create a Power BI Dashboard and include some visuals from your report there
- Share the report/dashboard
- Create a Power Automate flow and make sure you know what triggers, conditions and actions are
- Check what different ways there are to troubleshoot a failing flow
- Know what you can do with AI Builder
- Know what you can do with Power Virtual Agents (read this blog post, for example)
- Know the use cases for Power Apps Portals
Good luck!
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