I’ve passed Power BI PL-300 certification

Before 2025, I mostly ignored any opportunities for tech skills certifications. Sometimes it just requires too much efforts on preparation, and at the same time, the value of it is rather controversial. Google Analytics certification definitely can be named as one of the most common meme across digital analytics community – the existence of it can say anything about the person, but not about his or her competencies.

At the same time this year I decided for myself that preparation for certifications can be a good motivation to uncover some tools I didn’t work with previously, and to dig deeper into stuff I previously interacted with only on a surface level. So, during this year, I had a chance to complete several courses on Amplitude and Piwik Pro, renew my GA4 certification (ha-ha), and spent ~1,5 months on preparation and successful completion of GCP Associate Data Practitioner grade. And I definitely cannot say that it was a time-wasting activity – no, it was definitely fun and useful! I became significantly more fluent in cloud terms, re-visited a lot of stuff on product analytics topics, and, finally, became more confident in my skills.

I don’t remember why I selected Power BI as my next direction in my continuous learning path – maybe just because it always had an image of a Trojan Horse – you know that it is easy-to-use and easy-to-drive, but then you meet DAX for the first time inside of it. But at the same time, I just wanted to prove to myself that I have solid enough skills to say that it is not so complicated to work with all that stuff – even if for now I do not interact with it frequently.

Before active preparation, I didn’t use Power BI for two years. Previously, I had a chance to compose beginner-level and mid-level reports with the use of just standard functionality and no customizations. It is my personal preference – it is much easier to build data models in DWH instead of composing a star schema in Model view. But, of course, it is hard to say I was proficient with the majority of the available functionality of PBI.

My preparation took around 3 weeks and included 4 components:

• Standard Learning Path from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/courses/pl-300t00. To be honest, it was relatively useless – there is soo much temptation to skip that amounts of text content with no diving deeper. Courses also include labs, but it is another pain – it opens Power BI in Virtual Desktop, which works with a visible delay.
• Codecademy preparation course: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ext-paths/pl-300-power-bi-data-analyst. It contains a big bunch of videos across all topics + check-up tests after each module. It is fun to listen while you are doing something else, but hard to keep focus. Especially, it is related to modules about different types of visuals – authors pay tooooo much attention on how to customize it, even if it is obvious.
• Practice assessments from p.1 and p.2 – it was one of the most useful parts of preparation. I’ve completed practice assessments about 20 times, and it really helped me to remember a lot of stuff. While on the real exam, questions were completely different, prep assessments at least helped to be more confident.
• Power BI Desktop as is!

What does an exam look like? I would say that, documentation of Microsoft and Pearson VUE already provides a relatively clear image of how it works. At the same time, I would suggest paying attention to the next points:

• It is an exam of a visual-oriented tool where you cannot see the visuals. It means that in most cases you need to remember sequences of actions that need to be performed – sometimes it can be challenging when you don’t have Power BI interface on your screen.
• Some questions can be named as tricky, but not so hard – it mostly checks your confidence in selected answers. But, generally speaking, questions on the exam are harder than in Microsoft’s or Codecademy’s practice assessments.
• Sometimes it requires exact knowledge – DAX-related questions are exactly such case (we need to select right function for situation). Another good example – questions, where you need to build a sequence of actions (from fixed list of similar but not the same variants) to activate something. There is not so much of such stuff, but significantly more than in GCP-related certifications.
• In most cases, try to understand, is it reasonable to spend another 10 minutes on the question, or better to return to it later – the price of error is not so high.

I passed it on the first attempt with a score of 785/1000. I expected a bit better result – but it is still not bad for a person who didn’t interact with Power BI actively for 2 years, yeah?

The main question here – does it make any sense? I would say both yes and no.

Why not? First of all, because of confusion matrix-related nature of certifications as it is. An analyst without a certificate is not a bad analyst – he or she just didn’t spend time on that, but still can build comprehensive data models and beautiful visuals. At the same time, an analyst WITH a certificate is not a guarantee that this person will be able to resolve all related requests. A certificate as is is just a fact that this person completed the exam with a positive mark, but nothing else.

But! I really like this activity just as a motive to reach a solid understanding of the subject. Learning process is the most favorite part of any exam preparation – it is hard to imagine an easier way to receive your daily dose of dopamine. A certificate here is just a formal proof that you finished that activity successfully – but only formal, of course.

So, I’m glad that I tried to complete it, and I’m already going to start something new. I have some plans for the next learning activities – and, who knows, for new badges in the LinkedIn profile no one reads.