This is part 3 of 3 in a series designed to help Power BI users and enthusiasts. The first post focuses on identifying the dizzying array of skills that make up the Power BI ecosystem. It was created to help you take a personal inventory and assess your current skills. The Second post focuses on providing ideas for building learning plans and putting that base assessment to use. Finally, we come to this post where I’m going to focus on some key areas for how you represent your skills when the time comes. This post is for job seekers, for career movers and anyone else that finds themselves in a position where you need to represent your Power BI skills effectively.

Be Distinctive

All of us are unique. You have so many different qualities and passions, and your experiential knowledge is one of a kind. The many years it’s taken you to get to this point, the schooling, the challenges you’ve had to overcome, the boss that made your life miserable, the aha moments, and big successes are all part of who you are. There is SO much there…and you have a piece of paper, and possibly 30 to 60 minutes to convey that in an interview. How do you do that?

The simple answer is, you don’t. You do all that before the interview. You take those experiences. Take those challenges you’ve overcome. You embrace getting outside your comfort zone. You assess your skills, you set a plan of action, and you grow. It is through that commitment to action that you will grow in an area you are passionate about or hold interest in. The old adage, show me who you are by your actions is what sets you apart and will increase your chances of landing your next big job. If you are different, be different first.

Learning and growing will show well by themselves based on the answers you give. However, you can easily take this to the next level by showing what you’ve done. Build some reports and share the public links in your resume, start a git repository and store your stuff there. You can also add links to Community activities or blogs. As someone who hires people, I know this is the first thing I look for. This gives you an advantage because you show who you are before we even talk.

You are One in a Sea of Resumes

Regardless of the position being looked for, the reality is that you are a single candidate in a sea of resumes. I’m not a recruiter or human resources people finder. I’m don’t know all the different techniques you can use to make sure your resume pops up on someone’s screen. Here is what I can tell you based on experience looking at hundreds of resumes over the years. Firstly, there are certainly key words related to tech skills that I look for in order to find candidates. This should make sense. If I need a Power BI developer, I’ll be looking for Power BI in your resume. However, that just gets me to your resume, it doesn’t sell me.

Is your resume going to stand out? Not in a bizarre way, but have you really thought about how to convey your skills without writing 6 pages? Here are my top recommendations for increasing your chances of going from resume to interview.

Top Recommendations

1. Stack rank your skills. It should be abundantly clear somewhere what you are the best at and what you only have limited exposure too.
2. Don’t put every single program, operating system and application you have ever opened on your resume.
3. Condense your experience down to the most concise wording. You are putting your experience down to convey your knowledge not describe all your job functions in detail.
4. Have you blogged? Do you have a community user account where you are actively helping people? Are there any published reports of yours to look at? Do you have anything to show that you are different?
5. Do you have an ending that outlines what you are currently learning?

It requires effort to be distinctive. Adopt a learning mentality and let that shine and set you apart in your resume.

One of the best resumes I’ve seen had a link to encourage me to look at a Power BI report. The candidate built this to represent their skills. It was the longest I’ve ever spent looking at a resume. It showed the candidates skills, technique and understanding of how to put together a well polished report. They followed that resume with a solid interview where the technical skills in the resume aligned with the conversation. Instant hire!

Do Not Embellish!

A counter point has to be made right after pushing you to think about how to set yourself apart. I am not suggesting you embellish. One of the absolute worst things you can do is mis-represent yourself on your resume. Land an interview, and then display that you actually don’t have any of the experience that you said you had. Writing it down doesn’t make it reality. I love rating scales, its one way you can easily articulate your technical skills on a resume.

A business will have different needs, and it isn’t everything. For instance, you might know nothing about Power Query because you work in enterprise areas for data movement and shaping. However, you do have a ton of Modeling/DAX. That could be a perfect fit for an enterprise or more technical role. The converse is that a business unit may only need simple Modeling/DAX because all their issues revolve around connecting to, cleaning, and shaping data in Power BI. Those are two completely different skill paths.

Why Not Embellish a Little?

One of the challenges we’ve identified already is trying to convey who you are in a short amount of time. If there are huge differences between the way your resume conveys your technical skills and the way you can represent them in conversation you just took Trust off the table. And that will likely kill your chances of getting hired. All that work to get this far will get instantly flushed.

Another reason is that you may not know about all the other areas of need a company has. Just because you may not be a good fit for this role, the hiring person may pass your resume around to other parts of the organization. You may have the skillset that a colleague of theirs is looking for.

Understand the skills the position needs

Was the job description specific? Did it give you an idea of what skills were needed? Could you figure out whether the job was going to be business facing or more of a development role? If you said no to any of these questions, be sure you bring that up right away in the interview. Clarity around the type of position is really important to understand where the focus of questions should fall.

Pay attention to the details in the job description and focus on the areas where an organization is placing emphasis. If you don’t have skills in Power Query and the job description stresses that as a main area of expertise, you might want to pass on applying. This goes back to not embellishing. Just because you have focused a lot of your time in Power BI doesn’t mean that you would be able to perform all areas as an expert. The level of job, the requirements they are asking for and the years of experience are good indicators of whether or not it is the “right” Power BI job for you.

Be Honest

This is without a doubt the number one make or break thing for you in an interview. Just like embellishing, this will instantly kill your chances of getting a job if you aren’t honest. What do I mean by this? Here is an example that you might not think would qualify, but it does.

At this point its likely you just flipped the switch. An interview is so much more than just the technical things you know. The interviewer has a limited amount of time to get to know you, and even in a technical interview they are looking for all the key things that they would want to see in a team member. Examples like this erode, or destroy, the trust/honesty element. Right or wrong, an interviewer will take this information and apply it to other scenarios.

What answers like this represent is there won’t be an open dialogue, and a manager could have a new resource committing that they know everything. This would likely lead to over committing or missing deadlines. Either one is a recipe for conflict and a bad relationship. Be honest when you represent your Power BI skills.

Be Inquisitive

There is nothing better than having a dialogue with individuals around topics. As mentioned above, hiring managers are looking for a lot more than just what you can recite. Are you asking clarifying questions? Do you follow up with a question of your own, or talk through your thought process? Did you come prepared with questions on the company? Did you inquire about the team, and the direction that the company is headed. What is the work style, do they work under heavy process and procedure or is it the wild west. What does a day in the life of this job look like for you? All the questions you bring to an interview, show the interviewer that you have a vested interest in the company and the team you would be working on.

Be Yourself

The resume opens the door. The interview is the initial meet and greet, and any follow up meetings would be closing the deal. You wouldn’t have the interview if you didn’t appear to have the skills that a company needs. For all intents and purposes you should feel pretty comfortable, provided you have the skills you represented in your resume.

Bring your personality to the interview, engage as much as you can with the interviewer to let them see the side of you that you would show at work. This is important for a couple reasons. First, you want to show the interviewer a glimpse of the type of person you are. Without that, it can be hard to gauge whether or not you would fit with the team or wouldn’t. The other thing to keep in mind here is that you are interviewing the company, just as much as they are interviewing you! Show a bit of yourself in the interview to make sure that the company is one that you would want to join and you think you could be successful in.

Extend Thanks, Request feedback

Wherever possible, follow up with the recruiter or interviewer to extend thanks for their time. Hopefully it was an enjoyable experience for all involved regardless of whether or not it worked out. Extending thanks to people for engaging with you should have gone both ways, but you’ll never lose when extending a bit of closing goodwill. Wherever or whenever possible, if you don’t get the job, request feedback. Knowing the reasons is invaluable to you in your next interview or the job you apply for.

Do you lack certain skills, did you convey something that you didn’t mean to convey, was there a candidate stronger in a particular area. There is a huge disparity sometimes between how someone reads us vs. what we are trying to show. Getting this type of feedback is constructive because it leads to introspection and tweaking how you present yourself or a skill area you need for that particular job role. Other times, there could be no skill difference but a different candidate presented themselves in such a way to make the interviewer feel it was a better team fit.

Representing your Power BI Skills

There are so many roles and jobs that you can apply for now. There are also one’s you can focus on for future goals after you learn more skills, and build more experience. While I can’t make any guarantees, I can say that these tips and recommendations come from interviewing many Power BI candidates. These steps outlined above are key areas that will make your job hunting, your interviews, and your future interactions with your next career move a more positive one.

This wraps up the 3 part series that I wanted to complete to bring my insights and experience to all of you. This last post was the first one I wanted to write, but I couldn’t bring this forward without the first two. If you missed those, be sure to go check them out (Skills, Learning). This is the last stop, understanding your skills and adopting a learning mindset should be your first focus. Those set the stage for being successful personally, in an interview, or anywhere your career may take you.

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One of the biggest improvements you can make to your life and career is embracing a learning mentality. If you are here, I assume one of your interest areas is Power BI. This post is the 2^nd in the series to help individuals identify where your current skill strengths are, and where you have room for improvement. (The first post introduces the Power BI Skills Matrix and is designed to assess your current state.) After reading that you can dial in on your strengths and weaknesses and your now ready to start creating learning plans to build your Power BI Skills.

Therefor this post is a series of steps that I have used, still use, and remind myself to use, to stay on track. This isn’t a training manual. It is a compilation of ideas that you can use to formulate a plan of action and stick to it. I’ve carved this into four sections for easier digestion. First, some tips for any level. Second thru Fourth focus on different levels. Beginner, intermediate, and expert.

For Everyone

Pick a Time and Schedule It

The struggle to do this is real! In order to remain consistent, we have to be diligent in carving out time for ourselves to learn new things. Figure out how much time you want to devote to learning and schedule it. Literally, put it on a calendar and make it part of your routine. Not doing this results in large gaps in learning. Losing traction on the things you did learn. Or even worse, regressing instead of progressing.

Pause – seriously. Take a minute, figure out if its 1 hour or 24 and carve out the time in your schedule. Open your device/notebook/calendar and write it down.

Don’t Just Read it, Do it

This relates to almost everything in life. When you actually do something, you understand it infinitely better than just reading about it. I like to separate out my learning time in two ways. The first, starts with reading about concepts or ideas that I can jot down and reference when practicing it later. Visualization is a good example of this. Reading books, blogs, etc can uncover a ton of different methods, theories and approaches to building great visualizations. This requires time to digest these conceptual aspects before taking a direction. Only after we process it, can we start testing something out or re-enforcing our learnings by doing.

However, the second way is much more applicable to almost all of Power BI, and that is learning while doing.

• Connecting to Different Data Sources
• Cleaning & Shaping Data
• Modeling
• DAX
• Visualization & Properties

All these are best served by getting dirty right away. Have the Power BI Desktop open all the time when you are working on new concepts and learning new skills. Power BI makes this quick discovery so much easier now! You can immediately access and load a sample data set right out of the Power BI Desktop. Click Try a sample dataset

Select Load sample data

Choose financials and Click Load

Don’t just read tutorials, walk through them with the author. Don’t just find books that talk at you. Find those that invite you to follow along, or test out what you are being taught. Always, Always DO IT!

Share It

One of the most rewarding aspects of learning new things is sharing those new learned things with other people. Not everyone wants to devote all their time to speaking, blogging, making videos and interacting with the community at large. However, sharing what you’ve gone out of your way to learn with other people is very rewarding. Whether it is on the job or in community forums once in awhile. Not only that, sharing helps others out in ways you will never even know. Sharing what you’ve learned and experienced is the ultimate pay-off for continued learning. Investing the time to learn, then sharing that with others, makes all the struggles worth it!

Beginners

Have FUN! Embrace the Experience

There is a lot to learn, but don’t start the journey of building Power Bi skills thinking you should know everything. Just like you, we all started at the beginning at one point in time. The great thing about you starting now is that there are more people that can teach you things! One of the best ways you can start the journey is by joining the Community. Hop on over to community.powerbi.com and create an account. The forums and linked content in that single space alone will set you up for success.

I would also highly recommend joining a local User Group. Interacting with other Power BI users that are local to you is a great way to network. Joining the community and starting a Power BI User Group were the two single things I did that had a huge impact on my professional life and career. These communities get you engaged with others like you and open many doors.

Start with the Basics

Download Power BI Desktop and open it. Keep it open as you look for new things to learn. Within the tool is a link to guided learning. Click Help and you will see easy links to a multitude of MSFT created material.

Combine these quick links with the sample datasets we outlined above. You can see it is extremely easy to get started. Now you can test out the things you learn without the need to have your own dataset curated.

Find Your Learning Style

One of the best things you can do is figure out what methods of learning work best for you. Is it video? Presentation style or tutorial. Do you love books and will never give up the feeling of paper? Or do you need your tidbits in smaller chunks like posts, blogs or community posts? Try them all out! Once you sort that out, then dive into those sources for information. I could link to many of my favorites, but I don’t want to find your favorites for you. I want you to find them on your own. The only blog I will mention is the Power BI Blog from MSFT. This is where you will find all the latest news, and is the first thing you should subscribe to.

Use the Skills Matrix to build a plan of action

Take some time to figure out what learning path you want to head down first with the Skills Matrix. What is the most relevant skillset for your job, or the job you want? What have you struggled the most with? Do you want to know a little about everything, or do you want to focus on one area before others? Most of these questions can only be answered by you. Hopefully the Skills Matrix will help you figure out those paths. You might also find some helpful pointers in this Post by Steve Campbell. He outlines some different roles in a data solution.

What I cannot stress enough though is this. Understanding the fundamentals in Power Query, Modeling and DAX should be your first goal! It is important to get familiar with those areas before you start diving deep into anything else. Once you understand the basics of those areas. Dive into visuals and the properties and methods used to create good looking reports. There are so many great features that you can use to produce the best end user experiences.

Find Content Creators you like and Follow them

Why? Because this is one of the easiest ways to stay up to date on new things. It also serves as a reminder to keep on your learning path. Doing things alone all the time can get boring. You are also more apt to lose focus on your learning goals. Finding someone or some platform that you enjoy will be a subtle reminder to keep it up! Its also really easy to take a break and check your latest YouTube notification or twitter/Instagram feed. People are always posting relevant things you can check out.

Intermediate

Refine Your Skills

Now that you’ve had some time to build your Power BI skills, you likely have an area where you spend more time than others. DAX is likely front and center in your universe, and if its not, put it there. Without a good understanding of DAX. How it filters and shapes data, you will always be battling presenting the right data.

This is the point where the learning cycles get a bit more involved. You’ll be diving deeper into your interest areas or the areas you have to solve problems for all the time. If you clean and shape your data in Power BI. Maybe diving deeper into M and using the advanced query editor is more valuable. In either case, make sure you spend time refining your craft. Spend time to learn the languages above and beyond what you use daily. Also start to learn the tools that will help you troubleshoot and figure out performance issues in these areas.

Understand the underlying technologies

Power BI is the culmination of technologies that MSFT has had for many years. You may have some idea of this already. There has been a ton of work done to make sure Power BI has the full enterprise features from its originating products. Therefor, knowing how all these technologies work together is important. Especially something like Analysis Services. Understanding these concepts and tools is key to understanding how to work and interact with them. What does O365 have to do with Power BI? What is Azure AD? Where do I purchase licenses depending on the business needs? Why are there all these External Tools and how do I use them? All these are questions you should have an idea of how to answer.

Expand outside your comfort zone

By this time, you have an area of comfort. It might be visualization, it might be administration, or could be DAX. Push yourself to get into the things that don’t come easy to you. We all fight with the “fear of failure”, and learning new things falls squarely into that “fight or flight” response. Push past that and be sure to take little bites of those challenging areas. The more you embrace, rather than avoid, those challenging areas the better off you’ll be.

Expert

Stay Current

You already know building your Power BI skills is important. However, as you become more and more familiar with all the tools, languages and infrastructure its easy to become relaxed. Conversely, you may be getting overwhelmed with work and outside pressures. In some spaces taking a break might not be a big deal as releases are months if not quarters apart. However, Power BI continues to barrel ahead with change after change every month. It is important to stay plugged in to the community, events, blogs and the latest news that impacts your learning world. There is no end to refining and adjusting solutions and implementations of Power BI within organizations. Here is your reminder (and mine) that its crucial to stick with your learning schedule and stay engaged rather than just reading headlines.

Find Outlets to Share

If you are an expert in your field you are likely providing major value to one or many businesses with your expertise. As I mentioned above, one of the most rewarding aspects of accumulating knowledge and experience is being able to share that with others.

Some easy paths to engagement would be answering questions on the Power BI Community, or other online forums. Start a User Group and/or engage with your local group more. Try to blog a bit. Just because someone wrote about a topic somewhere in the world, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write yours. Alternatively, try to hone your skills to the max by biting the bullet and creating a presentation. I guarantee, nothing will lock in your learnings more than having to teach someone else how to do it. This is where your local User Group is important! It’s typically a smaller venue that can be used to hone your speaking skills. Get past your negative inner voice, just get something started and find out what path you like the best.

Go Deep or Widen your focus

There will always be something to learn, but you will certainly start to see things in a different way. One of the hardest decisions can be to choose to go really deep on a specific area, or focus your attention on the ecosystem as a whole. The driving forces here may be a career path change, or a future goal you wanted to achieve. In either case, the same principles you used to get you here will take you to the next level, keep it up!

Start Building Your Power BI Skills

Wherever you stand in the spectrum of the skills matrix, you will always have something to learn. Carve out the time, figure out a game plan, and execute on it. Building your Power BI skills and embracing a learning mentality will not only help you find a great job, but it will help you grow in your current one and expand into others that you only dream of right now.

The absolute best thing about owning your own learning path is that you take that knowledge with you wherever you go. Self learning provides you with a deeper understanding of how to solve problems regardless of datasets. This pulls you out of the “I only know what I did at school or in my job” mentality and gives you ownership of those learnings. It allows you to explain them, and talk about broader solutions. This alone will set you apart from a large swath of individuals that don’t have, or embrace, a learning mentality.

It is my sincerest hope that each of you reading this embrace a learning mentality and make it a part of your life.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

As always, you’ll find the coolest PowerBI.tips SWAG in our store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products: