Create and Manage Automated Processes by Using Power Automate

No. Power Automate cloud flows are built by choosing a trigger and adding actions from a list, so most of the logic is configured rather than written. You will meet expressions during the day, and they look like spreadsheet functions rather than programming, so anyone comfortable writing a nested IF in Excel already has the mental model. The Vantage 365 PL-7002 course teaches the expressions you need at the point you need them.

The Vantage 365 PL-7002 course costs £395 per person excluding VAT for the scheduled online course. Classroom and private onsite delivery are priced separately and quoted on request. The fee includes Microsoft Official Courseware, a dedicated lab environment, a Microsoft Learn achievement code, a certificate of completion and three months of trainer support. Call 0121 269 8660 for a team or onsite quote.

You do not need your own licence to attend PL-7002, because Vantage 365 provisions a dedicated lab environment for every learner and you work in that rather than in your organisation's tenant. On licensing more generally, most Microsoft 365 plans include Power Automate rights for standard connectors, while premium connectors, Microsoft Dataverse and some other capabilities need additional licensing. Vantage 365 will advise on what you actually need before you commit to anything.

Cloud flows connect services to each other through connectors such as SharePoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Dataverse, while Power Automate Desktop is robotic process automation, driving applications through their user interface on a machine, and is the answer when a system has no connector or API. PL-7002 covers cloud flows. It names desktop flows as one of the flow types so you know where the boundary sits, but it does not teach you to build them. If desktop automation is what you need, say so and Vantage 365 will point you elsewhere rather than sell you this course.

Microsoft Applied Skills: Create and manage automated processes by using Power Automate is a free, timed lab assessment that you take yourself on Microsoft Learn rather than at a test centre. You are given a live environment and assessed on the work you produce, with 45 minutes at intermediate level and the option to request a small amount of additional time. You cannot save and return to it, so it is a single sitting, and there is a 72-hour wait before a second attempt. PL-7002 is the preparation for it: the labs, a walkthrough of the official study guide, and three months of support while you get it done.

Three hours and twenty minutes of the day are spent in hands-on labs, against three hours and ten minutes of instruction. There are eight labs, running from validating your lab environment through to trigger filters, and they build on each other, so you finish with one working solution rather than eight disconnected fragments. Microsoft schedules the course as one full eight-hour day, including breaks.

PL-900 Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals is a broad awareness course covering Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Pages, whereas PL-7002 is narrow and deep, focused entirely on building automation in Power Automate. You finish PL-7002 with cloud flows you built yourself. Many people take PL-900 first, but it is not a requirement for PL-7002.

It depends on where the process breaks. If people have nowhere sensible to enter the data in the first place, start with PL-7001 Create and Manage Canvas Apps with Power Apps and build the app. If the data arrives perfectly well but nothing happens to it afterwards, start with PL-7002 and build the automation. Both are one-day courses designed to sit alongside each other, and delegates taking both can add the optional Applied Workshop day to build something of their own end to end.

No. Microsoft retired several Power Platform credentials during 2026, including PL-500 Power Automate RPA Developer and PL-600 Power Platform Solution Architect on 30 June 2026, PL-200 Power Platform Functional Consultant on 31 August 2026, and the Applied Skills assessment for model-driven apps on 30 June 2026. Create and manage automated processes by using Power Automate is not among them and remains available. With PL-500 gone, it is now the principal Microsoft credential validating Power Automate skills.

Yes. Onsite and private virtual deliveries of PL-7002 can be tailored so the running scenario becomes one of your own approval processes rather than the fictional Contoso Coffee scenario in the standard courseware. Teams usually leave those sessions with something close to a working flow, and onsite is generally better value from four people upwards. Call 0121 269 8660 to talk it through.

Sit the Microsoft Applied Skills assessment while it is fresh, ideally within a fortnight, and automate one real process at work in the same period. After that, PL-7001 Create and Manage Canvas Apps with Power Apps adds the front end your flows can sit behind, and PL-400 Microsoft Power Platform Developer is the step up into professional development.

PL-7002 covers building and managing automated processes in Power Automate across five modules and eight hands-on labs in one day. It covers the five flow types and when each applies, creating cloud flows with Copilot, from a template or from blank, triggers and actions, dynamic content, conditional logic using conditions, switches and parallel branches, approvals from the approval card through to acting on the response, building a data model in Microsoft Dataverse with tables, columns and relationships, the SharePoint and Office 365 Outlook connectors, button flows and trigger tokens, Dataverse triggers with change types, scope and trigger filters, querying with OData filters and FetchXML, data operations such as Compose, Filter array and Parse JSON, sharing and owners, and troubleshooting failed runs. It uses Microsoft Official Courseware, last refreshed by Microsoft in October 2025.

There are no formal prerequisites for PL-7002, and no coding experience is needed. Microsoft's stated audience is people already familiar with the Microsoft Power Platform who have subject matter expertise in the business processes they want to automate, and lists basic data modelling, user experience design, requirements analysis and process analysis skills as useful background. You will get most from the day if you arrive with a real process in mind rather than a blank sheet. Describe what you are trying to automate and Vantage 365 will tell you honestly whether PL-7002 is the right course, including when the answer is PL-900 instead.

A trigger is the event that starts a flow, and every flow has exactly one. Triggers come in three broad shapes: a schedule, such as running every weekday at eight; an event in a connected service, such as a new item added to a SharePoint list or a row updated in Microsoft Dataverse; or a person, pressing a button or submitting a form. Everything that follows the trigger is an action. Choosing the right trigger, and filtering it so the flow only runs when it genuinely should, is the difference between automation that helps and automation that fires four hundred times a day and gets switched off.