I want advice Balancing Blue Prism and Microsoft Azure Certifications for Career

[Elenagi]

Hello everyone,

I want to enhance my skills and career prospects in the field of automation and cloud computing. I have been working with Blue Prism for a while & I am considering getting Blue Prism Certification for my expertise.  I have seen that there is a growing need for cloud expertise & I am thinking about getting certified in Microsoft Azure as well. So that I want some guidance on how to balance these two approaches.

I have some queries please check this:

1. How have the Microsoft Azure and Blue Prism certifications affected your chances for professional advancement for those who have pursued them both? There are any specific jobs or sectors where both works particularly well?
2. Which studies or resources would you suggest using to effectively get ready for these certifications?
3.  There is any benefit to being certified sooner rather than later?
4. If you work a full time job in addition to preparing for many certifications  how do you successfully manage your time?

I would be appreciate any knowledge and suggestion witch you could provide. 

Thank you in advance for help.😊

Warm regards
Elenagi

[Michael_S]

@devneetmohanty07 any experience here?

@Asilarow I seem to recall you're experienced with cloud setups?

[devneetmohanty07]

Firstly, thanks @Michael_S for tagging me on this post and apologies for my late response as well.

Hi @Elenagi ,

This is a great step that you have taken towards your learning journey as Cloud services are in fact a great tool to have in your arsenal especially with how things are moving now in the automation and technology space. Though you are getting certified in both Blue Prism and Microsoft Azure, the first thing you need to understand is at what stage you are currently at. From this I mean, are you just beginning your automation journey as a developer, or you are moving more towards the Infrastructure and Technical Architect role at this moment.

Developer Track:

• If you are starting as a developer, my recommendation would be you focus on getting the Blueprism AD-01 and ASDEV-01 certifications as they are the foundational blocks for getting started on RPA. If you already have those, you can aim for Blueprism APD-01 or Blueprism ASD-01 as they are focused at Sr. Development and Solution Designer roles which will be eventually your next phase as part of the RPA developer roadmap.
• From Microsoft Azure perspective, my suggestion would be to go for AZ-900 (Azure Fundamentals)  as it would give you an idea about all the services that are used within Azure landscape which can be further integrated using DX Exchange based assets or custom code within Blueprism business objects.
• You should also opt for PL-900 (Power Platform Fundamentals) certification as it would help you familiarize with Power Platform components such as Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power BI that can be used to create front end low code apps, reports and dashboards, chatbots and automated trigger-based flows that can be integrated with the processes that are developed using Blue Prism.
• General idea with developer track is to have basic fundamental idea regarding cloud services which can help you to not only integrate these services to further boost your automated processes but also gain insights at how these solutions can actually be used to solve business problems at scale.
  
  For example, I had a use case where business wanted to automate a process where the requirement was to migrate most of our bots from Outlook client to Microsoft Graph API's which is managed via Microsoft Azure. We had to do some research based on how to integrate the same with our Blue Prism environment and figure out the relevant access roles out. Having knowledge about how Azure Cloud works helped me here to set up the entire governance and development framework around it.

Infrastructure & Technical Architect Track:

• If your role is focused more on setting up the Blue Prism server components and managing the networking protocols, VM machines for runtime resources etc. then you should be learning the concepts that are taught as part of the Blueprism ATA-02 (Technical Architect) and Blueprism AIE-02 (Installation Engineer) certification tracks.
• From Microsoft Azure perspective, you will need to AZ-140 (Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty) and AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Associate) certification tracks which are focused on networking aspects and how to setup servers and machines with different OS platforms on Azure cloud.
• General idea with infrastructure and technical architect track is to have intermediate to advanced knowledge regarding virtual machine setup, networking protocols that would be needed to create the entire Blueprism infrastructure for the RPA CoE team. This would also determine the how efficiently communications are handled between each component to reduce bottlenecks in Production runs that is critical for support and maintenance.

Again, my main focus is on the learning rather than the certifications themselves even though I am a great advocate of certifications as it makes sure we all stay aligned with the course structure and get the best out of what it is intended towards.

My primary suggestion on balancing things is create a schedule at your end once you assess on what level you currently are. I never encourage people to learn too many things at the same time as it may work for some, but I feel it can be very overwhelming down the line. So, if you are going for one certification let say, then just focus on that and learn everything around it that you can then you go to the next one. If you are starting on Blue Prism and Azure, my take is first clear AD-01 from Blueprism, get some practical hands-on and then you jump to AZ-900.

Now, I would like to answer your ither queries:

1. How have the Microsoft Azure and Blue Prism certifications affected your chances for professional advancement for those who have pursued them both? There are any specific jobs or sectors where both works particularly well? - Although, I have good understanding on many of the Azure services, I don't have a certification in it as of now. But from my experience, having all seven certifications from Blue Prism has tremendously helped me as there were certain areas on which I did not have any practical exposure but due to the course content I was able to do extensive research at my end to somehow get grasp of these contents by myself. Coming to cloud, it is now being adopted by almost every firm and you would get requirements to integrate services from these Cloud providers as part of your automation projects so it is essential to know about the same and getting certified can definitely help there. Mainly, financial, insurance and retails sectors have a huge demand as of now regarding cloud integrations.
   
   
2. Which studies or resources would you suggest using to effectively get ready for these certifications? - For Blueprism, the Blueprism University is a great starting platform to begin with after which my suggestion would be to go through various blogs, youtube videos on different concepts. Being active on community can definitely help as well since there are some good discussions on advanced topic and people can definitely help here. Coming to Azure, I personally found Udemy courses to be really good for it along with Microsoft Learning that provides you these courses as part of their LMS platform.
   
   
3.  There is any benefit to being certified sooner rather than later? - Benefit lies on the fact that on what stage you currently are at and how soon you want to advance in your career. As technology is advancing, these certifications will also keep on getting updated and so will the requirements, so my key take is if you have made up your mind for any such certification, just make a timeline and get started on the same.
   
   
4. If you work a full-time job in addition to preparing for many certifications, how do you successfully manage your time? - This totally depends on how you can break your time as in my case, I spent most of my weekends to prepare for these certifications. During weekdays, I would at least find an hour or so just to go through one or two topics, or if I felt tired, I would just revise what I studied during weekends. Again, managing time in itself is a skill which is pretty subjective so what worked for me may not work for you. I would suggest though atleast have a plan and a timeline on how you are going to target a specific certification and break it in terms of course of contents.
   
   P.S. Chat GPT can be a boon for you if you can use it effectively during your learning period as it can help to create a study plan for you and resolve certain doubts for sure (don't rely completely on it though).