It’s time to assess your skill set and grow it!
Take inventory and focus on developing your technical growth and understanding, and hopefully - personal fulfillment on the job. Your industries demand a lot. You give a lot. It’s time to take a little (time for yourself). Skill expansion and skill honing are tools you control to ensure future responsibilities, nab new roles, and find the YOU in you as you seek them.
Below is a quick-scroll reference article of six skill-building resources (and one bonus) to help you discover durable, dynamic resources designed to help you do just that: Know thy skills and grow them. Your command of them puts you in demand.
Structured learning: Microsoft Learn | Spark possibility.
Build skills that open doors. And benefit from curriculum experts to do the knowing for you. From awareness of documentation to skill-building hands-on training, through to industry-leading certifications – Microsoft Learn helps you get the most from Microsoft products.
Microsoft Learn, accessible at learn.microsoft.com, is a dynamic platform designed to provide structured, interactive learning experiences for individuals at all levels of expertise. It offers a wealth of resources, including hands-on labs, tutorials, and certification paths, empowering the Microsoft tech community to discover the latest technologies and advance their professional skills. 🤔
Review the AI learning hub as a great, recent example. Plus, one of their ‘how to’ samples, Create your own collaboration governance plan.
Visit Microsoft Learn to discover more.
User enablement learning: adoption.microsoft.com
The Microsoft Adoption Center at adoption.microsoft.com offers invaluable resources for technologists, providing comprehensive guides, best practices, and community support essential for the successful deployment and adoption of Microsoft technologies. By leveraging these tools, professionals can stay ahead of the curve, ensuring seamless integration and maximizing the potential of their Microsoft solutions.
“Onboard employees at scale while being confident that you are improving the employee experience.” — Microsoft
Microsoft Learn helps you understand how to use technology. The Adoption center provides tools and materials to ensure durable deployment and use of your technology investments.
Review the Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption hub as a great example of what to expect. And learn deployment and enablement best practices for “How Microsoft does IT.”
One unique skill-building offering you can use from adoption.microsoft.com is the Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways solution. It is a customizable, on-demand learning solution designed to increase usage and adoption of Microsoft 365 services – from within your organization. At the end of the day, the solution is a fully customizable SharePoint communication site within your Microsoft 365 tenant – a training portal to house your organization's help, support, and community content, to help build digital skills in bite-sized trainings.
Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways solution and how to deploy it into your own tenant.
Learning within Microsoft 365: Viva Learning.
Where Learning pathways focuses on Microsoft technology, Microsoft Viva Learning fosters skill development within an organization – giving you the ability to aggregate various learning services, like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Skillsoft, and your own custom training. 🤯
By integrating learning directly into the flow of work, it empowers employees to continuously upskill, driving both personal growth and enhancing organizational value. Viva Learning not only supports individual professional development, it cultivates a culture of continuous improvement and innovation with the ability to track assignments, recommendations, completions, and learning collections.
Learn more about Microsoft Viva Learning. It’s a great skill-building resource you can deploy directly within Microsoft Teams.
support.microsoft.com supports you
The Microsoft Support website at support.microsoft.com offers a wealth of help and how-to content, empowering you to efficiently accomplish tasks with Microsoft products. It provides step-by-step guides and videos, troubleshooting tips, and comprehensive resources that cater to both novices and advanced users, ensuring everyone can leverage Microsoft tools to their fullest potential. 👐
The authors and producers of Microsoft Support content work closely with product makers, giving you both accurate and timely information when new features launch and as changes come to your Microsoft 365 production environment.
Visit support.microsoft.com to get “help and how to” across all Microsoft products. Check out Microsoft Teams help & learning or Microsoft Copilot help as two great examples of what you can expect to find; and one of my biased favorites, Microsoft Lists help & learning.
Microsoft Tech Community
The Microsoft Tech Community site is a vibrant hub for the best community in tech, offering a treasure trove of technical blogs, engaging events, webinars, AMAs, and lively discussion forums. In my opinion, it should be a near requirement to sign up and establish an MTC user profile, not only to search and consume, but to engage and share. It is an essential platform where members exchange ideas, seek expert advice, and stay updated on the latest technological advancements — fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous learning. Being a learn-it-all is a two-way street.
Check out some of the main site locations to discover what the Tech Community offers:
Plus, a sampling of the nearly 100+ communities:
Create your own profile and join the community. Sign up and sign in today.
Find your next event: CommunityDays.org
Events, big and small, all offer opportunities big and small. The opportunity to learn. The opportunity to share. The opportunity to engage at a much deeper level – having the kinds of conversations that offer follow up, back and forth, and grounded understanding.
CommunityDays.org is a great platform for discovering upcoming in-person and online events tailored to your interests; it follows the “for community, by community” model. Whether you're looking to learn from industry experts, network with like-minded professionals, or promote your own webinars and calls, CommunityDays.org gives you an evergreen map to decide where and where to connect. 🌍🌎🌏
I wanted to call out a sampling of five upcoming events to give you a sense of what you’ll find as you peruse the CommunityDays.org site:
CollabDays - Bletchley Park | Sept. 24, 2025 | Milton Keynes, UK
Memphis Microsoft Community Days | Oct. 2-3, 2025 | Microsoft Office, Memphis, TN
Experts Live US | Oct. 10 | Microsoft Office - 11 Times Square, NYC, NY
CollabDays - New England | Oct. 17, 2025 | Burlington, MA
Copilot Community Conference | Oct. 29, 2025 | Online
BONUS SKILL | Invite someone to coffee (or tea)
Sharing is caring. Sharing coffee (or tea) with others is caring a lot. Sip responsibly.
Ask questions and share what you know. It’s a two-way street and caffeine paves the way for great connections; maybe a sweet or two – as they say, “Two birds, one scone.” ☕🍵🥐 Open up the possibility to sync with another Microsoft 365 community member to discuss the latest features and updates, share tips and tricks for maximizing productivity, commiserate on some frustrations, or exchange ideas on best practices for solution building.
And hey, share your “what to do in this city” with each other to promote a work/life balance that’s balanced with lasting memories. You never know when the free flow of ideas fosters a long-term professional relationship — dare I say friendship.
I hope all the above helps navigate where and how you want your skillset to grow. Remember, your Microsoft 365 expertise is your competitive edge. Sharpen it. These resources are evergreen and provide centers of gravity to assess where you stand, fill the gaps, and build skills - new and old. Your future self—and your career—will thank you.
“Know thyself. Now, grow thyself.”
— Mark Kashman (written as a close of this article)
Cheers, Mark “Ya got mad skills, kid!” Kashman