From End-User to Partner-Side Consultant: Continuous Learning

 


Introduction

This post is part of my series on the journey from being an End-User to becoming a Microsoft Partner-Side consultant (see Tag: End User to Consultant).

Moving from being a business applications end-user to joining a Microsoft partner organisation is an exciting and rewarding journey.

Continuous learning is a vital part of being a consultant. When you are in the professional services game you are selling your time and expertise. You can't put your time on the shelf and sell it tomorrow, you can only sell it right now! Additionally, to be able to provide the best service possible you need to be on top of the latest system features and benefits that will drive value for your clients. Therefore, you must dedicate time every week to learning, getting the knowledge that you, in turn, provide many times over when guiding and advising various clients.

How to drink from a fire hose?

It has been said that to stay on top of all the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform news from Microsoft is like drinking from a fire hose. It’s important to consider the scope and depth that you want to maintain knowledge on. Some areas may require a deep understanding, while others might be fine with just a high-level view. Your plan can change, of course, but I recommend making a plan and categorising areas between detailed knowledge and high-level overviews. This will help you focus your learning plan & prevent a feeling of helplessness if you were to try to learn it all!

Here are some resources that I use to try and keep on top of things. Personally, I’m most interested in D365 BC and how you can extend it with Power Platform. So the examples are all focused in that direction!

D365 BC Learning Resources

Microsoft Training Paths

The official Microsoft training resources are a great place to start. Head on over to the page where you can browse all the training https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/browse/ and simply filter for what you want. In my case I’m picking Products: Dynamics 365 > Business Central & Type: Learning Path.

Be sure to log in with a personal Microsoft account when you do the training, it will track your progress (and you earn XP). But more important than that - when the training is updated because there is a new feature, you can easily see which leaning paths have had changes as your ‘completed’ status returns to show percent complete.

Here is a real example

I know I’ve been through that in the past, but today it's showing only 88%. I can check what's been updated and very easily just review the new content. Super-handy.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an absolute must for keeping on to of BC news, there are a number of really great contributors, from the likes of BC MVPs, Microsoft employees and the many official groups.

There are far too many great contributors on LinkedIn for me to list them all here, and depending where you are on your learning journey different people might better to follow. I started to make a list but it's hard to do it justice, there are simply a huge number of other amazing BC people to follow! If you are starting from scratch follow some MVPs, they will often repost good stuff from other community people, so you can build up you follow list naturally over time.

I tried ChatGPT and Copilot with “who are the best people to follow on LinkedIn for content about dynamics 365 business central” which gave some pretty decent suggestions to get you started! Here is the ChatGPT output as that’s shareable…

Here are the Microsoft people I follow, mostly from the BC engineering team, they are very good at posting BC news and re-posting interesting content from across the platform.

  • Søren Friis Alexandersen - Principal Product Manager, Dynamics 365 Business Central. Lots of news about BC
  • Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan - Principle Program Manager - Kennie ran a great series on Telemetry last season, this year he’s focusing his newsletters on security - always a good read.
  • Mike Borg Cardona - Principle Program Manager. Lots of news on BC events and features
  • Mike Morton - VP Dynamics 365 Business central. It would be rude not to follow the top man for BC at Microsoft! Mike often posts piece-to-camera videos for important news about BC and related Microsoft technology.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Company page managed by Microsoft - well worth a follow for the news & updates they post.

Blogs

A bit of an overlap with LinkedIn as most bloggers will put a post on LinkedIn when they have written a new article. There are a couple of tools to help you stay on top of the news from bloggers, there is a Telegram group for BC Blogs & News and I have created a similar tool as a WhatsApp community.

Special mention blogs:

Yun Zhu - https://yzhums.com/ - the most prolific blogger out there. So much so most BC issues you can best find an answer to by googling ‘<you problem> yun zhu’.

Podcasts/Webcasts

Another great source of news, a different medium, lines are blurred between what a podcast used to be (audio only right?) and these days they all seem to have video also.. Anyway here are a few that I got started with - if you know some other good ones please drop a link in the comments!

  • Erik Hougaard - Weekly hacks and insights on BC - Another legend of the BC community, lots of videos focused on development of BC from beginner to AL Jedi master. Most of Erik’s videos he will code on screen and share lots of tips, tricks and hacks. A very good page to follow, but also check out the most popular videos if you want to learn how to do BC development - some really great guides there.
  • Steve Endow - I Need Coffee Weekly BC Review - Steve is a great guy, easy to listen to, and his weekly reviews have all sorts of handy bits and bobs. He also started a 'Learning BC Dev from Scratch' series, which could be very interesting for anyone functional wanting to understand more about AL for BC.
  • Solution Systems - A Shot of Business Central and a Beer - Michael and Ken are a great pair and this series is a lot of fun. Also combining BC and Beer what could be better!
  • Tobias Fenster - Window on Technology - Been running since 2022, episodes typically feature an expert talking about a specific technology area, either as an introduction or to share the latest news or big changes coming. I smile every time I read the title as I appreciate a good language pun…
  • Business Central Under the Hood - Interview series from Microsoft, part of their Business central YouTube Channel. Always interesting to hear from the people that build and maintain BC!

Other web sources

Finally a few other handy sites to check out to help on your continuous learning or keeping on top of new features.

What do you think?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments

Connect or follow me on LinkedIn to get all my updates Andrew Wingate | LinkedIn