Learning and Certification Productivity CRM Audio

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Learning is important. Joel has started a bi-weekly LinkedIn newsletter about learning--why it is important to be a life-long learner, choosing a learning goal, and tools to help learning. On the podcast we discuss our learning goals. Matthew Anderson has also been pursuing certification, and he talks about his strategies for learning and test-taking.
Other topics in the episode:
Smart pens: Neo Smart pen and Moleskine Pen +. https://www.amazon.com/smartpen-N2-Bluetooth-Digital-Smartphones/dp/B00ST8GT8W/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Neo+smartpen&qid=1582039395&sr=8-4 Edge collections: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/20/collections-now-available-microsoft-edge-preview/ Microsoft certification poster that shows the intersection of all Microsoft certifications: http://aka.ms/TrainCertPoster Taking certification exams: how to read the questions and scenarios to optimizing finding the correct answers. Going to testing center vs. online proctored exams Show notes:
 
[00:00:23] And Matthew. How are you doing day, Joel?
 
[00:00:27] I am excellent. Welcome to 2020.
 
[00:00:29] A little bit late in a little bit. Yeah, yeah. But we've been so productive we haven't had time for a podcast.
 
[00:00:36] Exactly. it's prioritization. And I think we both had that silent agreement that we have some things we're focused on right now.
 
[00:00:44] Well, actually, last week on my My Analytics for the first time I hit 42 percent of time for focus.
 
[00:00:53] Oh, congrats on that. I feel like I've graduated to new level.
 
[00:01:00] Yeah, I can say I have that much focused time scheduled. I am not hitting it, but I am getting more and more people to respect that time that I've got out there. So it's a it's a process. We'll say that.
 
[00:01:17] Right. So I've been putting a focus for 2020 on learning, trying to get some certifications as well as learn some other other things. I find that, you know, sometimes you get a little stale and you need to update your skill set, especially working with technology. You can do anything with learning in 2020.
 
[00:01:37] Yeah, absolutely. So the most recent certification I earned is the Azure A.I. Engineer Associate Certification.
 
[00:01:47] That's the A.I. 100. It was the exam. The core exam behind that one.
 
[00:01:53] So is this like super deep data science stuff for what is it?
 
[00:01:58] So it is a collection of cognitive services, including language, understanding and prediction, translation, and getting into machine learning pipelines. And how do you actually build and structure those services together to be able to meet the need for some sort of end user use case?
 
[00:02:22] Cool. So what what made you decide on that one versus all the other many things you could study?
 
[00:02:31] Yeah, so I had a stretch goal for myself around kind of getting outside of the business applications kind of silo within our product cloud, the different solution areas, I wanted to do something in Azure and I looked toward what are those things that are that I talk about the concept of in the biz app platform a lot, but I'd like to be able to go deeper and, you know, chat with folks about what's going on behind the scenes, talk intelligently around what some of those capabilities are and what really comes up a ton. Is these things around cognitive services and kind of improving those experiences using prediction automation around that. So it seemed like a really good fit. And then with the advent of the A.I. Builder Capabilities and power platform and some of what we have inside of customer insights and being able to make predictions about this kind of super set of information about customers, it just seemed like a really appropriate place to put some of that learning effort into.
 
[00:03:43] Definitely a hot area there. So how much