Microsoft RETIRING PL-100 Microsoft Power Platform App Maker Certification

By Microsoft MVP and MCT · Pluralsight Author

Published January 19, 2024 · Updated January 15, 2026 · Learning & Credentials, Power Platform

Microsoft has announced to learning partners that the PL-100 Certification exam will be retired shortly – and it has allowed us to talk publicly about it early as they update the Microsoft Learn Pages!

Microsoft Announcement

Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

  • The PL-100 certification exam for Power Platform will retire on June 30, 2024. You can still take the exam until that date, and it will remain valid for one year after you pass it.
  • The retirement of the PL-100 exam won’t significantly impact the overall Power Platform certification portfolio, as it wasn’t a prerequisite for other certifications like the PL-600.
  • Microsoft introduced “applied skills” as a new way to earn credentials. These are specific to tasks or scenarios and can be taken without a proctored environment, unlike traditional certifications.
  • There is a significant overlap between the PL-100 exam and the new applied skills, particularly in areas like Power Automate and Power Apps. However, applied skills focus on specific products rather than the entire platform.
  • While applied skills are valuable for demonstrating proficiency in specific products, they may not feel as official as certifications due to the lack of proctoring and the ability to take them anywhere. The speaker encourages feedback and opinions on this topic.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone. If you want to get Power Platform certified, I have some important news for you. Microsoft announced the retirement of the PL-100 certification exam and the Power Platform App Maker certification. If the only certifications you have right now are in the Power Platform, this might come as a bit of a shock, as this is the first-ever Power Platform certification to get retired. In this video, we will learn when the retirement will happen, what happens when a certification gets retired, whether it will still be on our profile, if we should bother taking it between now and the retirement, or if it all goes away. Finally, we will learn what, if anything, will replace the PL-100 certification exam. So let’s get started right after the intro.

First of all, let’s start with the very important stuff. The PL-100 certification exam and associated certification will retire on June 30, 2024. You can still take the exam until that date, and the exam will be valid for one year after you take it. So if that’s an exam that you have been studying for, or if it was maybe required for your end-of-year bonus, you can still go and take it until June 30, 2024, and the exam will still show up as active on your transcript for one year after you take it. So you can still have it active in 2025. If you already have the PL-100 certification exam, then you can still renew it, especially if your renewal date comes up very soon, but eventually, it will expire, and the ability to renew it will go away at some point in the future.

Now, where did the PL-100 fit inside the Microsoft Power Platform certification portfolio? Microsoft had one fundamental level exam, the PL-100. We have, I say have, but we still have them today when I’m recording this video, five different associate level exams: the PL-100, PL-200, PL-300, PL-400, and PL-500, which focus on an App Maker, functional consultant, PL-400 for developer, PL-300 for Power BI, and PL-500 for a robotic process automation developer. Then we have the PL-600 certification exam, which has some prerequisites, but if we pass the prerequisites and that exam, we will become a Power Platform solution architect. After June 30, we will lose the PL-100 certification exam. As you can see, it doesn’t have a bigger impact on the certification portfolio, especially as it was not a requirement for the PL-600 certification exam. So really, it going away will not have a big impact on the portfolio. Unlike the modern workplace portfolio, where we lost 50% of the exams in the past 12 months, the Power Platform is still staying solid. This is, again, the first Power Platform certification to ever get retired, and I hope we’re not going to see any others soon. But the PL-200 remains a solid option, especially if you are an IT consultant. We will talk more about the audience for the PL-100 and where it differs from the PL-200 shortly.

A question that I’m sure a lot of you have is what happens when a Microsoft certification retires. Does it completely go away from your portfolio? Is it even worth renewing it or passing it today? Well, the certification will forever show on your profile and transcript. On the left side of the screen here, you can see some examples that I have of certifications that I passed, such as the Microsoft 365 Certified Teams Support Engineer Specialty and the Teams Administrator Associate. They were still on my profile when I took the screenshot a few years after they expired, and they show as expired, but the fact that I got those certifications and that I passed them will forever be on my transcript. Now, if you take the certification today, it will still be active for one year after you pass the exam or for one year if you renew it. It will add one year to your expiration date, so we will still see a lot of people that have the PL-100 certification active way into 2025, especially if they had it before and then they renew it during the first few months of 2024. After that certification expires one year after your last renewal or one year after you pass it if you pass it right now, it will still show up on your transcript, but it will show up as an expired certification, very similar to what you see on the left side of the screen here. It’s the same way that certifications that you did not renew will show up. They still show up there, but they show up as expired.

Now that we took some of the different important dates and facts out of the way, what does it mean for Power Platform professionals? What does this retirement actually mean? Does it really matter or not? First of all, something that I want to talk about is what was the target audience for the PL-100 exam. I copied this from the Microsoft Learn page and highlighted a few things that are important for me. First of all, it starts with, “If you’re a business professional with deep expertise in your solution domain and you want to use your passion for building Microsoft Power Platform solutions to simplify, automate, and transform tasks and processes for your team, the certification is designed for you.” Note that it says this is for business professionals. It’s not made for IT consultants. It’s not made for IT experts. It’s made for business professionals that have a passion for building Microsoft Power Platform solutions. In the second paragraph, I highlighted the part in blue, “Even if you might not have formal IT training, you’re comfortable working with IT administrators and Power Platform developers using technology in your business problems.” Again, we have the highlight that this exam was not necessarily designed for people that have been doing IT for 20 years with formal IT education. It was open for anyone in any department, in the HR department, in the accounting department, that had a passion for improving processes and automating tasks with the Power Platform. This exam was achievable for them. This is what I loved about this exam. It’s not a fundamentals level exam, which are quite easy compared to the rest of them, and it has that fundamentals tag on them. A lot of business professionals wanted to show their skills to the next level, and the Power Platform App Maker or the PL-100 exam was really an achievable associate exam target, whereas the PL-200 is made for consultants that do this every single day.

Now, why did Microsoft retire this exam? Of course, I do not have access to all the information that Microsoft has. I don’t have all the studies they did, so I’ll talk a bit about my opinion on all of this. If we take a look at what happened in the past few months, a big change that Microsoft released a few months ago around Microsoft Ignite in November 2023, Microsoft released applied skills, which are a new way to get a Microsoft credential. So now, when we talk about Microsoft credentials, we have both certifications and applied skills. Certifications validate broad technical proficiency, whereas applied skills only validate one specific skill. Microsoft certifications are role-based, so are you an App Maker, are you a functional consultant? They’re really made for roles that Microsoft found out are in the industry, whereas applied skills are very specific to a task or a scenario. The other big difference is that Microsoft certifications are very question-based, so you need to study, you need to remember things. They might be very theoretical, even if some of them do have some labs inside. It’s not the full exam. You still have a lot of questions you need to take, and you need to take them in a proctored environment. So you don’t just take them at home with nobody watching. You need to either take them at a Microsoft certified training center where they have the ability to pass exams, or you can take them from home, but you have a proctor watching you, monitoring your screen, monitoring the other applications. You cannot cheat on Microsoft certifications. However, applied skills are just a lab. I love the idea that it’s just a lab, but you can open it anywhere you want. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s there to watch you. Nobody’s there to validate that you’re not cheating. You’re just doing the exam on your own time at home. You don’t need to schedule it. You just go in the browser, click on start, and then you start your lab. There’s no scheduling, no proctor, none of those things. You just go in the browser and do the lab. There’s no questions in it. It’s just a lab. You open up the virtual machine or the remote desktop in the browser, then they give you a list of tasks. Let’s say for Power Automate, they say, “Vlad, I need a flow that will do this, this, and this.” After that, you go to the flow, you have a few of those scenarios. When you think you’re done, you click on end lab. They run some magic in the back, and if your flows work and do what they needed to do, then you pass the applied skill. Very, very different. Microsoft has been investing quite a bit in those applied skills. Now, there are 19 in the middle of January 2024, and Microsoft has quite a few of them on their roadmap.

Why did I even mention applied skills? What does it have to do with our certification exam? There are three Power Platform applied skills, or business applications applied skills, to follow the official naming, that are of particular interest to us. First of all, there’s one called “Create and Manage Automated Processes Using Power Automate.” There’s another one called “Create and Manage Canvas Apps with Power Apps.” Finally, “Create and Manage Model-Driven Apps with Power Apps and Dataverse.” If you know the PL-100 exam, you might ask yourself, “Vlad, doesn’t this have quite a bit of overlap with the PL-100 certification exam. If we look at the objectives, on the left, I took all the Power Automate skills measured from the PL-100 exam and compared them with the Power Automate applied skill objectives. As you can see, we have an almost complete overlap when it comes to Power Automate. We also have a big overlap with the other two applied skills. Microsoft mentioned that the applied skills are not a direct replacement for the exam. That is absolutely not the goal. However, the applied skills are a bit of an evolution to the exam, where people don’t need to do the full exam. They don’t need to learn every single product in the Power Platform to get a Microsoft credential. This allows them to get certified or get a credential on one specific product.

From a training and certification point of view, the PL-100 right now is four days of training. Applied skills are only one day of training if you follow instructor-led training by a Microsoft certified trainer at a training partner. Of course, if you do them yourself on Microsoft Learn, because all the material for both sides of the comparison here are free on Microsoft Learn, you can do it in your own time. But still, the PL-100 is about four days of content, while the applied skill is one day of content. The PL-100 is amazing for learners who want to learn about the whole platform at a maker level. It wasn’t only one product; you go there, you learn about the whole Power Platform at a maker level. Applied skills are for a specific product inside the Power Platform. If you do the PL-100, you want to get trained with the official course, you need to sign up for the whole course. You don’t have the option to just learn one of the products; you’ll learn the whole platform. With applied skills, you can sign up for only the products you want to learn. It might be one of them, it might be all three of them. This is the big difference. I think we will see a lot more applied skills going forward.

Looking back, in my previous certifications six or seven years ago, Microsoft did not have the concept of role-based certification. We only had product-based certification. You were getting certified on SharePoint, on Teams, on a specific product. You were not getting certified on a role such as Power Platform App Maker. Getting certified on a role might be a blocker for some people. For example, I love Power Automate; it’s my favorite product from the Power Platform. I do a bit of Power BI and some Power Apps, but they’re not my favorite. Imagine I’m an internal employee somewhere, and my job is to be a Power Automate consultant. I never touch Power BI or Power Apps. If I need to get certified, I also need to be proficient in those in the current role-based model. The advantage with applied skills is that I can show a Microsoft credential in a single product, like we could back in the day, which I am a big fan of.

Now, my thoughts on retiring the PL-100: I honestly believe there was a place for both the PL-100 certification and the different applied skills available now on Microsoft Learn. I saw them as complementary and not competing with each other, even if they had a lot of overlap. Don’t get me wrong, I love applied skills. I think they’re valuable, awesome, and great for people who want to show their proficiency in a specific product. I’m thinking of the person in accounting or HR who wants to get a Microsoft credential in Power Automate without having to learn Dataverse, Power Apps, Power BI, and all the other stuff. It’s amazing for them. However, maybe it’s just me, but I feel that applied skills are not as official as certifications. The fact that you can take them wherever you want…

I was at Microsoft Ignite in person last November 2023, and Microsoft Learn had a certification bar where people could go and pass applied skills right there at Ignite. Sometimes, you had two or three people looking at the same monitor, working together on an applied skill. An applied skill doesn’t have that guarantee like certifications, where somebody learned it by heart, put in a lot of effort, went to an exam center, or did it online. We know they did it proctored, we know they did not cheat. Of course, there are ways to cheat, but we’ll assume they did not cheat. Cheating and dumps are bad; don’t do them. It decreases the value of certification for everybody. But still, certifications were more official for me, whereas applied skills are a bit less. Maybe my opinion will change in the future, maybe because they’re new.

But I want to know, what are your thoughts on this retirement? Are you PL-100 certified, or did you want to get the certification? What’s your take on the retirement and on applied skills versus certifications in general? Please let me know in the comments below. I’d love to learn more about your opinion on this. And maybe if you have any questions about applied skills, I can get somebody from Microsoft to do a video with me where we clarify all of those. So please don’t hesitate to put those inside the comments. Thank you very much for watching this video. I really hope you have enjoyed it and found it valuable. And remember, if you want to get the latest news on certifications, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Copilot, make sure you like the video and subscribe to the channel. Thank you very much again for watching this video.