>> Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to Less Code More Power.
We have an amazing show for you today.
We have Joe Camp,
who's going to be talking all about how you can switch
your career to the Power Platform. Stay tuned.
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>> Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to Less Code More Power.
I'm Sarah Critchley and I'm joined by
my amazing co-host, Dona Sarkar.
One of the things that is so important is
talking about how you can
switch your career to the Power Platform.
We have the best guest on to be able to
really tell you an amazing story,
his own personal experience.
Joe, welcome to the show.
>> Thanks, Sarah and thanks, Dona.
Real quick on my story.
I was in financial services for a long time,
17-18 years, worked for a local bank.
Then the bank fell on some hard times,
which a lot of banks did in the 2007-2008.
My role was eliminated and trying to figure out what to do,
where to go, what we needed to do.
At the time, there really were not a lot of roles in
the banking industry because
there was a big consolidation going on.
It was time for me to try to figure out,
do I move back to the East Coast?
I currently live on the West coast.
East Coast is where I'm from,
and my wife is from,
or do we stay where we are and pivot into something different?
Part of that conversation was my wife told me,
"I like it here where we live, which is in Seattle.
You need to figure out how we can stay."
With that and with the idea of pivoting,
I had a conversation with a friend of mine,
one of my neighbors who worked at Microsoft.
Through conversations, a number of different conversations,
I was hired to work for him as a vendor.
Which then became a full-time employee role
and the role was one where it was more community oriented,
program oriented, business analyst oriented.
Some of that were applicable to what I used to do,
which was very finance.
A lot of playing around with spreadsheets,
a lot of trying to figure out how to
maximize return on investment and some other stuff.
To more relationship management and
building internal and external relationships as
well as some projects and planning and that sort of thing.
Big pivot, but some of the things that I used to do were
applicable and then a lot of other stuff I was able to learn.
It was really cool,
still learning the tech part of the role,
and being in tech,
and continuously challenged by my manager who won't be named.
>> That must have been really tough, Joe.
Just to go into that point, essentially,
your job didn't exist in your original company.
That must have been a pretty tough time for you
because it's easy for us to talk about in retrospect, right?
Because you're okay, you've landed on
your feet. That must have been tough.
>> Yes, it was scary.
You're used to having a consistent income coming
in and that didn't happen.
I had a severance package, but obviously you're limited.
Honestly, for about eight months
I was out of work and looking and trying
to figure out what to do and it was pretty darn scary.
Fortunately, I had a good support system with
my family and my immediate family.
Then my parents and others and as well as the friends around me.
Also was able to build a pretty good network of contacts.
At the time, LinkedIn was there,
but it wasn't really as prevalent as it is
now in the ability to build
those online networks and that online networking system.
Fortunately, I mean, it was scary for sure.
I think what helped was being willing to change,
being open to change,
being willing to walk
into something that you don't know a heck of a lot about,
but you're willing to learn and want to learn.
Maybe even take a pay cut a little bit,
but you know that in the end you'll make yourself whole,
for lack of a better way to say it, in the end.
It was scary, but the networking was huge.
>> I think a lot of people are going to be
able to resonate with that.
If you're watching and this has happened to you, we get it.
I think everyone on the call
today has had this kind of experience.
I think that it's important to remember that,
Joe you really touched on something.
The willingness to be open to
other opportunities and to also know that it's going to be okay.
Before we get into some other things that you wanted to show us,
could you just share a little bit about some of
the amazing stuff you've been doing recently?
Because you've created a course on
Udacity, all this kind of stuff.
There's a lot of things that you've been doing.
>> Yeah. This is a bit self-serving,
but it's not intended to be that way.
The self-serving part is because my manager is
the other person on the clock. The Udacity course
>> I'll let [NOISE] you finish talking.
>> Just a real quick background.
I had been in this role as part of
the Power Platform Power Apps team that Dona is running
since July and didn't know a ton about PowerApps.
Played with it a little bit, but not a lot.
A lot of willingness to grow and
willingness to learn and Dona took a chance on me,
so thank you and hopefully I'm doing what she's expecting of me.
Some of the things that we're working on,
it's trying to figure out how to
take PowerApps and show people, like me,
that are not tech oriented,
don't have a CompSci degree,
don't know how to code but had
played around with Word and played around with PowerPoint,
with Excel, a lot of Excel,
and then translate some of those skills into building apps.
Part of that and to what you touched on with
the Udacity course that we built, it drove.
The team that I'm on with that include Greg Hurlman
and Gomolemo Mohapi ,they did a ton of the work.
I was the guinea pig and then it was like,
if Joe can figure this out
then I think we're working down the right path.
>> It's like tester or QA analyst.
>> That's a better descriptor for sure.
But yeah, it's a really cool course.
It goes into how you build out an environment, first of all,
and then going through step-by-step on building an app and how you
can craft that app
or build that app to however you want it to look,
and then you pull in some AI,
which the AI is really cool.
Even somebody that's not super geeky,
the AI stuff was really,
I even geeked out a lot
about it because I was like sending texts to
Dona and to other folks on the team.
Like I did this with the AI and this was so cool.
This is going to be like the best party trick in the world when
we're able to have parties again,
hopefully that'll happen soon. But yeah,
so that and then also looking
at the job market for Power Apps and Power Platform.
One of the things that's really been interesting since,
I guess starting in November,
I started looking at the numbers in September,
but starting in November,
December, and into this month,
what's really been interesting are the number of,
I guess I'll say, large,
management consulting firms that are looking for people,
excuse me, that have Power Apps,
Power Platform skill sets.
These are the Deloittes,
the Ernst and Young's,
the Accentures, KPMG, Totachi.
Let's see. Some of these are focused really on tech,
but then also they're focused on business oriented roles.
I think from my perspective, I'm looking at this,
I'm thinking, all right, these are all really smart people.
They typically need to be looking at things in the future.
I think what we're seeing is that they are
looking at their customers
expectations down the road and
pulling these people in will help meet those expectations.
To me, well, it's like a funnel.
You've got the tech people up at the very top and then you've got
the management consulting folks that are
looking to build out their group of people that are going to be
driving Power Apps and Power Platform
because their customers are going to look for it.
Then at some point, the customers are going to say, hey,
wait a minute, we can learn internally how to do this.
Then this, sorry, I'm doing all this,
long base of people that are finance people, that are accountants,
that are marketing people,
that are HR folks are going to learn this
and it's like this is so cool that
we are helping people be more productive
and reduce process flow to
be more effective and more efficient in their roles.
>> Giving them opportunities. That's the biggest thing.
>> Yeah.
>> This has honestly been so great.
Could you take a couple minutes.
I want you to show to the audience,
especially based on what you said about
your story, where you've come from.
Can you just take the next few minutes to
show the audience what you've been able to make?
>> Yeah, sure. Let's see.
This is a Power App that I built.
It's like an inventory tracking Power App.
This is based off
of really something that in a role that I used to have,
I would have loved to have had this thing where I was in charge of
all the swag that we had for
the team we were on when we would go to conferences.
This tracks all that swag.
This is just the splash page and it's tied to
an Excel spreadsheet which pulls information in and out.
Then there's a ability
that you can go in and switch this page to another page that
you can add and subtract the pieces of inventory as you use them.
Now everybody on the team knows what's going on.
What we have in inventory?
What we don't in inventory?
There's a couple of other screens that
show where the inventory is allocated to.
Like say for example,
this first top one where I have 14.
Well, I think that maybe 26 of those were
allocated fictitiously towards Ignite.
It just makes things a lot simpler and a lot easier.
It was pretty easy to get all that done.
I think I did it in a day or less than
a day when I first started learning how to
play with these things. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
>> This is amazing.
I always love to use the time rapid application development.
It has a lot of different meanings,
especially from the development world,
but I really do think this technology brings it to life.
Like you said, you've been able to make this in less than a day.
>> Yeah.
>> That's amazing. I have
so many questions but I'm trying to hold back.
Given everything you've said and everything,
what's your message to people, Joe?
What do you want the homework to be for the episode today?
>> From my perspective,
I think the homework is twofold.
One, check out our Udacity course. It's free.
It'll take you, I don't know,
depending on how quickly you work eight to 10 hours to do it.
You can do it over two weekends.
I think you'll really get a lot out of it.
Second, for those who are thinking about
moving to a different role or have an interest
in looking at some other opportunities,
on LinkedIn, we have a Power Platform job board.
It's private.
I'm one of the admins and I'll add you in.
You can just look me up, Joe Camp and
then just message me or you can request to become a member.
We have close to 700 people on there that include recruiters.
There are people globally.
We post job descriptions as we get them.
We've been getting a ton lately.
Then I'll put some posts in there
myself on what I see within LinkedIn.
I think it's a great opportunity and we'd love to have you
participate and look and see what we're doing.
>> Brilliant. Those were two amazing pieces of homework.
You've heard it here everyone.
For those of you watching,
if you're interested in a job in Power Platform,
please do check out the links
below that we'll put in the description,
and also check out that course as well.
Like Joe says, you can complete that in a couple of
weeks and your knowledge will go from zero,
if you don't know anything about Power Platform,
to knowing so much to be able build an app like you've seen today.
Thank you so much for your time today, Joe.
It's been amazing to have you as a guest on the show.
>> Thank you very much, Sarah, and thank you Dona.
This has been my pleasure. Really appreciate it.
>> Brilliant. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks for those of you who have been watching today.
Like I said, check out the links below and remember,
less code, more power.
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