How to Pass Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals Exam (PL-900) for FREE

October 02, 2021 | 5 Minute Read

As always, I’m trying to keep learning and doing it for essentially no cost to me. Fortunately, the cloud is a great place for entry-level professionals who are on a tight “budget”. So, I recently got my first Azure-based certification and did it all in essence for free (paid for one part, but that’s optional). Here, I’ll compile all the resources I used to pass the exam.

Background

Every person, business, or entity needs an application, automation, analysis, or AI but may not have the skills to do so. Before making all of those things happened, you needed a team of developers, data scientists, or analysts to compile all of the elements and know-how to design, build, and deploy. However, with the introduction of Power Platform, anyone can learn to meet their needs without being an expert in all of those areas.

What is the Power Platform Fundamentals Exam

Power Platform is a Microsoft product that gives its users the ability to develop apps, create AI, automate tasks, and analyze data in a low/no-code environment. The Power Platform is comprised of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Business Intelligence (BI), and Power Virtual Agents. All of which are tools to enable the users themselves to develop their products customized to their own needs. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty, if you want to read more check out the documentation to read more.

Microsoft provides the Power Platform Fundamentals Exam (PL-900) which will test your knowledge of the platform. There are 5 domains of the exam that include:

  • Describe the business value of Power Platform
  • Identify the Core Components of Power Platform
  • Demonstrate the capabilities of Power BI
  • Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Apps
  • Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Automate
  • Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Virtual Agents

The exam details for the skills measured can be found here. The questions on the exam I obviously can’t share. But there aren’t just multiple-choice questions on the exam. You can find multiple-choice single response and multiple-choice multiple responses.

Free Prep Options

To prepare for the exam, there are many ways, but one of the two ways that I utilized was the Microsoft Virtual Training Days. These are free training webinars that are provided by Microsoft free of charge. The catch is, there are limited sessions, and the sessions are capped at a certain number of registrations, and only happen a few times a year. However, if you can attend, these training are typically three to four hours a day and can span at most two days. In the training, they cover the basics of the information needed to get started. To sign up, you can check out the remaining Microsoft Virtual Training Day sessions here.

I know personally, that information was not enough for me to feel comfortable taking the exam. So, Microsoft provides free self-paced training. The self-paced training goes through the same material as the webinar training, but you can go at a pace that is more conducive to your learning style. There are also labs that you can follow that will give you some hands-on experience too. Check out the Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals Learning Path for more information.

Finally, using practice questions is always useful for me. In the training day and self-paced learning, there are “knowledge check” questions that are multiple-choice questions. I’ve compiled all of the knowledge check questions and more into a quiz format on GlobalQuiz. Additionally, you can go to WhizLabs and they have 20 free practice exam questions you can use. The WhizLab questions are great because they provide explanations and links to documentation for each question. However, I noticed some of the questions are worded weirdly and the answer choices can have spelling errors.

Cheap Option

I find that getting a cheaper, quality practice exam is always worth it. Normally because they are either written by experts/experienced members, compiled from many people, and normally just more detailed than free exam questions. WhizLabs provides a paid option for JUST the practice exam for the PL-900 (and at the time of writing this article all MS courses and exams are half off). Additionally, I was able to find discount codes by just googling “WhizLabs Discount Codes”. You can find access to the one that I used on Offers.com and using the 30% off. The combined deals got me the practice exam questions for $11. Again, they’re good for the explanations and docs they relate to the questions and the domain-focused questions.

Free Exam Options

Early I mentioned the use of Microsoft Virtual Training Days, by attending the sessions for the fundamental level courses, you automatically qualify for a free exam voucher. The voucher is associated with the email that you register with. Then when you schedule an exam, there will be an option for a discount from Microsoft Virtual Training Days.

Also, depending on your employer, if they have a partnership with Microsoft you qualify for another free exam voucher. Using my work email in addition to attending the training I was able to qualify for two free vouchers, both were viable for 6-months to a year.

Conclusion

I think it’s only fair to mention that I work with Power Platform daily in my job for the last 10 months so that 100% helped in preparing for the exam. But using the free virtual training, self-paced learning, practice exams, and hands-on experience all helped me pass the exam today. Even with my experience, I learned a lot of new things that I can’t wait to use in my daily development!

As always, I appreciate you for taking the time to read about my discoveries and learning in my tech journey! If you want more visibility into my day-to-day learning follow me on Twitter or reach out to me directly using the Contact Page.