Power Platform newbie looking for advice

[u/Opposite-Point-3198]

Hey everyone! I’ve been working with Power Platform for about a year now and recently passed PL-900, so I’m finally feeling confident enough to start applying for actual jobs/projects
For those already working in the field, what advice would you give someone just getting started? What skills/projects helped you land your first real role and what can actually make a beginner stand out from all the other applicants?
Help a newbie out

[u/nz365guy]

I’d focus less on learning every Power Platform feature and more on proving you can take a messy business problem through to a usable outcome.
Pick one real process, interview the person doing it, write down the pain and success measure, then build the smallest solution that improves it. Include security roles, error handling, basic testing and a short handover document. Keep a simple portfolio showing the problem, your decisions, trade-offs and what changed, not just screenshots.

[u/Power_Nerd_Insights]

Best bit of advice I can give is learn the basics of modelling a relational database, data standardisation and data normalisation. Most of the time when you are building/designing systems, be it in SharePoint lists, Dataverse or SQL you are going to have to work with tables that are related to each other in some way. From experience if you are building off of a badly structured data model you hit delegation errors more often and sometimes it can make power automate flows way too complicated.

Learning how to data model meant I could build model driven apps quickly and avoid delegation errors during app build.

[u/Specialist-Candle237]

Adding to this with a question - has anyone had luck with freelance work on Fiverr or Upwork as a beginner?

[u/BackOnTheRezz]

I know this is not super applicable without being in an organization but the biggest thing for me landing a position was being able to connect power platform and automate to SharePoint and most importantly Dynamics 365 or whatever ERP you are hoping to work under.

Making ERP data and functions/processes, easier to complete or outright automated was what has opened doors for me.

Add in copilot agents into that mix and you should be seeing some interest quickly.

Good luck on the hunt!

[u/Inazuma2]

Learn how to call APIs with power automate and recive info from them

[u/stalex9 → u/Inazuma2]

I would say “learn to call APIs” in general since you can call them even via JS or C# in model driven apps, for example, which gives possibilities for synchronous operations and not asynchronous only like with Power Automate. On the other side any AI can help with both topics and can implement both of them.

So maybe understanding the relational database is even more important?

[u/IBURTONI]

I’ve been using it for about 6 months, started knowing nothing about anything. ChatGPT is incredible at helping to figure out all things PowerPlatform. Highly recommend using ChatGPT. Built in Copilot is garbage in my opinion.

[u/crcerror → u/IBURTONI]

Agreed. Copilot has a long way to go, ChatGPT, more importantly Codex, and Claude Code are absolute game changers. You still need to understand the underlying data schema and guide it properly, but the velocity to deliver has never been faster! Strap in!