I’ve recently started some work to help a cohort of people get ready for taking the Power BI certification (PL-300). To help them prepare, I wanted to get a better idea of the topics which commonly appear in the exam.
To do this, I found every set of example exam questions that I could, and noted down their primary topic area and any related sub-topics. As an example, take a look at the following question:
I logged the main topic of this question as “PQ functions” (Power Query Functions) and the sub-topic as the “Unpivot” function. Whilst I realise that some people would classify the questions differently to me, I think that overall, my analysis should give a good picture of what comes up most frequently on the exam. Here is my analysis in a public Power BI report.
You can access this interactively here.
I think that the topics do reflect the reality of using Power BI fairly well. Clearly DAX is an area that people find challenging and the emphasis on this ensures that people put the right level of effort into learning it. If you haven’t spent a reasonable amount of time practising DAX, it is very difficult to become PL-300 certified and I think that is appropriate.
I also firmly agree with Performance/Efficiency being a highly emphasised topic because in practice, I spend a great deal of my time optimising poorly performing artefacts. I am pleased to see the emphasis on Power Query functions because again, this is a core area of our work in the Power BI community.
I do however feel that there are a few topics which could be emphasised/de-emphasised. It is a shame to see Dashboards so high up as in practice I have very rarely seen them widely used / adopted. The idea of a dashboard is good and I wouldn’t remove it from the product, but I really don’t think it should be higher than modelling in terms of the exam. Modelling should be right up there with DAX, PQ functions, etc in terms of the emphasis. Most of the issues my clients have can be traced back to a poorly developed model.
For anyone studying for the exam, I hope that this is a useful resource. My other advice is to make sure that you get access to a practice exam because the format of the questions take a little getting used to.
I would also read this excellent blog post from Johnny Winter (Greyskull Analytics) which I read before I took my own exam. Note that this is about the DA-100 exam (the predecessor to PL-300, but not too much has changed.
Finally, I think the exam will evolve soon as Microsoft Fabric changes the landscape. I think a good place to start would be to add content on Dataflows. This is already an important part of the Power BI world, and with access to new workloads (including Dataflows Gen 2) in Fabric, I think Dataflows is a good place to start.
Good luck to anyone trying to get certified!
The Meloro Fabric Blog 