I have always been extremely enthusiastic about Microsoft certifications. This enthusiasm has carried me to accomplish almost all Power Platform and D365 business solution oriented certifications there is available at the time of writing. Yeah, enthusiasm and maybe a little bit about having the bragging rights as well 😜

I know the certifications divide opinions for various reasons. Yet I still think they are a good way to validate your knowledge, and show that you can and will work towards achieving the certification you desire. What i’m not sure is that if it’s humanly possible to get maximum points 😅 I have once came quite close to that, but that was a long time ago, and the exams have taken quite a leap after that.

Story of MB-280

First time I heard about this new certification was around May 2024, when they announced the new certification along with depricating three certificates. My initial thoughts at this point was like wow…. sounds like the difficulty might go up a notch. There was a possibility to try MB-280 in the beta phase with a discounted price, so I thought it would be a good idea to contribute to the common cause by trying the certification 😊

Basically as the end result Microsoft combined three certifications into one certification. You might think that this might be a good thing, makes things simplier when the amount of available certifications is a bit less than it currently is? While I do agree on this part, here is the catch:

The difficulty level of the what-used-to-be-a-basic-certification-for-sales, went a lot higher than I anticipated. Typically your learning path on traditional Customer Engagement (CE) modules probably start with first learning basics of the Power Platform, then Sales, and then it used to extend to Marketing (now Customer Insights – Journeys). After you have gained enough knowledge and have thirst for more, you continued towards Customer Service or Field Service. Naturally it depends a lot on your own personal interests, customer projects you work upon, your employers requirements etc.

What basically has now happened is, that you must have knowledge from D365 Sales, Customer Insights – Data & Journeys to be able to succeed in this certification. Naturally also about Copilot in/for D365 Sales, but who was surprised? 😁

On the bright side, I do feel that these are extremely important functionalities to learn! Especially if you consider what kind of skills are needed in the upcoming years. But does everything have to be combined under one certification? This is the thing where I feel it didn’t go so well.

New talents who start working on this field, and starts to learn, have a huge learning curve before they can succeed in this certification. I’m happy to be wrong on this one, but I felt the exam was quite tricky. Multiple case studies, and lot’s of questions with a lot of pre-question text which you need to read and understand. And if you have to rely on the MS Learn, which has recently become a possibility to do during exam, you are most likely going to run out of time.

What it means for certficate to be in Beta?

It’s not uncommon for a certificate to be a beta version.

Microsoft’s definition regarding beta Certification exams, and how to participate:

If you want to save your employers money, or in case you have to buy the exam yourself, beta exams is a nice way to save some €uros, if you are fast enough to purchase a virtual seat for it. Last day for reduced price for MB-280 is September 13, 2024, in case there are still seats available for the discount.

While there are positive things like having the possibility to contribute to the exam quality and development, and being on the edge of the trends, there is one negative thing about this, and it’s that you have to wait about two weeks after the exam goes live, before you get to know your results.

I always love the excitement of waiting for the result screen to load, so this is always a huge anti-climax to wait such a long time. But what can you do 🤷‍♂️

Final thoughts

Even though I was a bit ranting about MB-280, I still encourage everybody to give it a shot! Might be that i’m alone with my thoughts, who knows! But by writing my thoughts here, I at least try to give a little bit of an idea to you readers on what to expect.

And who knows, maybe this feedback might also steer Microsoft to do some further development for the exam, and it might look totally different once the exam goes live 😉

Enjoy your certifications y’all!

EDIT [4.11.2024]: Got the results of the beta exam on the 1st of November. Despite of the nagging I still got the exam successfully passed 😜