Plans on Microsoft Learn: Your online blueprint for building AI and Azure skills

We get it—you have a mountain of online learning resources available at your fingertips, and with that information overload you can find yourself lost in a maze of unorganized materials. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Plans on Microsoft Learn, a new tool that provides guided learning for top Azure tools and solutions.

This innovative approach provides a structured roadmap for individuals or teams to acquire new skills, offering focused content, clear milestones, and support to speed up the learning process. In this blog we’ll introduce you to Plans on Microsoft Learn and explore a handful of curated Plans to get you started!

Reimaging online learning to keep pace with technology

Developing in-demand technical skills is crucial for career advancement, but finding the right starting point can be overwhelming. Plans on Microsoft Learn helps individuals, teams, and organizations reach their learning goals faster, offering curated content, milestones that you can accomplish in the recommended time or at your own pace, and automated reminders to keep you motivated.

Build new skills with expertly designed learning paths, or create your own Plans tailored to your specific needs. Team leaders can easily manage and track their organization’s progress with the ability to copy and administer existing Plans.

Explore an expansive collection of AI-related Plans

We have a growing library of Plans on Microsoft Learn designed to accelerate your learning journey:

• Explore Microsoft Learn Career Paths: Unlock curated Plans for 15 in-demand career tracks.
• Dive into Microsoft Learn for Organizations: Access eight Plans focused on the hottest tech topics and team training, including building skills for Microsoft’s powerful AI services.

We are developing more Plans all the time, but let’s go in-depth on a few to show you the full value of this new skilling experience.

Microsoft Fabric is our powerful analytics platform designed to simplify the process of turning data into insights. Unifying data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence, Fabric offers a seamless end-to-end experience, eliminating the need for businesses to piece together tools from different vendors.

The goal of this Official Plan is to help you use AI to unify your intelligent data and analytics on the Fabric platform, and has learning milestones that include:

• Ingest data: Learn various methods for bringing data into Fabric, including shortcuts, pipelines, and dataflows.

• Transform data: Transform data using dataflows, procedures, and notebooks.
• Store data: Learn how to store processed data in both the Lakehouse and Data Warehouse for efficient retrieval.
• Expose data: Discover how to create reusable semantic models in Power BI to make the transformed data accessible for analysis.

Migrating and modernizing with Azure helps individuals and organizations seamlessly transition their workloads and applications to the cloud. With step-by-step guidance and tools for migrating on-premises infrastructure and data to Azure, you can update legacy applications and take advantage of Azure’s advanced cloud-native features.

This Official Plan is about migrating and securing Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux Estate to Azure, with particular focus on:

• Cloud-native and Hybrid Solutions: Learn to create and manage data platforms that work effectively in cloud-based and on-premises environments.
• SQL Server and Azure SQL Services: Gain hands-on experience with SQL Server, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to build and manage robust database solutions tailored to your application needs.
• Azure Arc for Multi-Cloud: Understand how Azure Arc enables SQL Server across different cloud environments.
• Performance Optimization: Understand strategies to maximize the speed and efficiency of data platform solutions.

The need for intelligent apps is surging as businesses and individuals seek to harness the power of AI and machine learning. These apps offer the ability to deliver personalized experiences, analyze complex data for better decision-making, and streamline workflows for increased efficiency. As AI technology evolves, intelligent apps will become even more indispensable, revolutionizing how we interact with technology in our daily lives.

This Official Plan, focuses on building and modernizing AI-powered intelligent apps, and includes lessons on:

• Database selection: Learn to choose the right Azure Cosmos DB option for your AI application.
• AI integration: Understand strategies for incorporating AI into your technical or non-technical solutions.
• AI Copilot development: Explore how to build an AI-powered assistant using vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB.

AI-powered tools offer immense potential to accelerate developer productivity by streamlining coding, automating tasks, and providing intelligent recommendations that save time. By embracing these tools, developers can focus on innovation and strategic problem-solving rather than mundane coding tasks.

With this Official Plan you’ll learn about coding in the cloud with GitHub Copilot, our AI-powered assistant that enables developers to focus on the more creative and strategic aspects of their work:

• Coding with GitHub and Azure: Seamlessly integrate these platforms and leverage GitHub Copilot to streamline your development workflow.
• DevOps planning: Identify the critical GitHub features to optimize your organization’s enterprise DevOps strategy.
• Build communities: Promote collaboration, establish clear guidelines, and uphold security standards within your developer community.

Building resiliency into your cloud infrastructure is crucial for maximizing efficiency and controlling costs. By carefully aligning resources to match your workload demands, you can eliminate waste and avoid unnecessary expenses for unused capacity.

This Official Plan demonstrates how to optimize your cloud architecture and workloads so your organization can invest in ongoing growth and innovation, and includes teaching on:

• Tools and frameworks: Analyze and improve workloads and environments using FinOps Framework, Cloud Adoption Framework, Well Architected Framework, Cloud Center of Excellence, and more.
• Landing zones: Leverage best practices from the Cloud Adoption Framework and deploy landing zones to align business and technical strategies for successful cloud adoption.
• Resilient workloads: Manage and optimize your environment to maximize business value, cloud security, new workload migration, modernization, and reliability.

Migrating your VMware workloads to the cloud can unlock new levels of flexibility, scalability, and cost optimization. The Azure VMware Solution allows you to seamlessly migrate and run your VMware workloads natively on Azure, leveraging familiar VMware tools and skills.

This official Plan guides you through the process, ensuring a smooth transition and effective management of your VMware environments on Azure, including comprehensive instruction on:

• Azure VMware Solution basics: Understand the core concepts, benefits, and architecture of running VMware on Azure.
• Migration strategies: Explore various approaches, tools, and best practices to ensure a smooth transition of your VMware workloads to Azure VMware Solution—including both live and cold migrations—to minimize downtime and disruption.
• Deployment and configuration: Get detailed guidance on setting up and managing your Azure VMware Solution environment, including networking, storage, and security to ensure optimal performance.

Begin your AI learning journey today

You and your team deserve better tools to get skilled and stay competitive in today’s fast-moving market. Visit our AI learning hub for resources to help your team understand the potential of AI, develop AI skills, and successfully adopt AI solutions. There you’ll also find eight current AI-related Plans and complete guidance on how to get started!

The post Plans on Microsoft Learn: Your online blueprint for building AI and Azure skills appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.