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We’re pleased to announce the new Microsoft Certified: Fundamentals site, designed exclusively for the community of learners who want to pursue a Microsoft fundamentals certification. Are you looking for a way to stand out as you start on your career path? Want to switch jobs and pivot to something fresh? Or master the basics as you advance in a challenging role? Explore the Microsoft Certified: Fundamentals site to learn how certification can help you achieve your goals. Earning a fundamentals certification differentiates you as someone who’s willing to learn and takes concrete steps to make their goals a reality.
Who needs a fundamentals certification?
Whether you’re a technical professional, student, or business professional, a fundamentals certification is designed to help you accelerate your progress, boost your career, and stay current with evolving technology trends. It can be the first step on your journey for role-based or specialty certifications, but it isn’t a prerequisite for any of them.
Use Microsoft fundamentals training and certification to highlight your skills and to show prospective employers your drive and determination to learn. Take it from Chris Dinnel, a system administrator with a cybersecurity background, who wanted to move his career to cloud infrastructure. He earned a Dynamics 365 Fundamentals certification and got a job as a Dynamics 365 administrator/IT technician at SBS CyberSecurity. He comments, “Certification is a great way to show people that you can take initiative and communicate that kind of abstract concept, like self-motivation, which is otherwise hard to show on a résumé.”
Use fundamentals certifications to validate the skills that you’ve worked so hard to hone. Plus, earning fundamentals certifications can give you the confidence to pursue higher-level certifications as you move forward in your career journey. A Global Knowledge survey notes that 87 percent of IT professionals have at least one certification, while nearly 40 percent are pursuing their next certification. April Dunnam, a developer with many certifications, reports that when she learns a new technology, she often earns a fundamentals certification just to get a broad understanding. For example, when she was learning Microsoft Power Platform, she earned the fundamentals certification, recalling, “It seemed like a good starting point because it’s about the basics.”
A fundamentals certification on your résumé can make a difference as you launch your career. An IDC white paper points out that those who earned a certification prior to their first IT position were promoted 23 percent sooner than their counterparts who didn’t earn one. Use your fundamentals certification to build practical, workplace skills for in-demand jobs and to gain an edge in a competitive labor market. When you study for a fundamentals exam, you learn industry-standard technology from an industry leader, in addition to earning marketable proof of your knowledge.
If you have a passion for technology and are switching to a more technical role, earning a fundamentals certification can help ensure that you’re up to speed. According to The Nigel Frank Careers and Hiring Guide: Business Applications Edition 2022, 68 percent of respondents believe that certifications help you stand out in a competitive job market. Respondents who received a salary increase after they earned a certification said that their take-home pay rose by an average of 20 percent.
Get started
Begin by going to the new Microsoft Certified: Fundamentals site to gather information and make your learning plan. Each certification’s landing page includes a journey map that offers a visual explanation of the steps you need to take. If you want to work with an instructor, read About Microsoft Learning Partners.
Choose a certification path
Depending on your skills and interests, the new fundamentals site will help you choose the fundamentals certification that’s the best fit for you.
Find a community
Join a community to network with others who have a passion for Microsoft technology, share ideas, and ask questions. You can also find news about Microsoft events and learning opportunities.
Celebrate with the world: Post your badge on LinkedIn
Once you earn your fundamentals certification or learn a new skill, celebrate your accomplishment with your network. It often takes less than a minute to update your LinkedIn profile and share your achievements, highlight your skills, and help boost your career potential.
The new Microsoft Certified: Fundamentals site offers you even more support as you move ahead on your learning journey. Join the community of professionals who have earned a Microsoft Certification and get what you need to land that first job, advance your career, or shift your focus to a new and exciting technology.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Enriched profiles in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights help you understand your customers’ brand and interest affinities so that you can provide the hyper-personalized experiences across touchpoints that today’s customers seek.
Brand and interest affinity insights are based on first- and third-party signals and data from people like your customers in age, gender, and location. This month we are announcing two enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enrichment feature:
Affinity level. Every enriched customer profile now includes an affinity level, from low to very high. Levels are in addition to the existing affinity score, which is calculated on a 100-point scale. Either can be used to measure affinity and to aid easy segmentation.
Share of voice. This information can be used to identify which brand or interest is highest for a given demographic segment. Share of voice is a comparison across brands and interests that you select.
Introducing affinity levels
We added the affinity levels enhancement to simplify the process of identifying a demographic segment’s affinity for a brand or interest. Previously, affinities were assigned a numerical score with no fixed scale. Affinity levels map directly to affinity scores and are designed to make the affinity scores more accessible. There are four levels:
Low
Medium
High
Very High
With this enhancement we also fixed the scale of the affinity score. It’s now calculated on a 100-point scale.
The setup experience for affinity enrichments hasn’t changed. Users will see the updated experience automatically.
The following image shows how the new affinity levels appear on the My enrichments > BrandAffinity and My enrichments > InterestAffinity views:
Introducing share of voice
Share of voice identifies which brand or interest has the highest proportion of popularity. It’s an important measure because it helps you understand whether your customer is more likely to engage with you or focus on your competition. The affinity for a brand or interest is calculated as a ratio of its popularity for a given demographic segment (age, gender, location) as compared to other brands or interests.
Previously, affinities and interests appeared next to each other in the My enrichments dashboard. While there’s a natural tendency to compare them against each other, they’re not directly comparable. Share of voice calculates comparatives across your selected brands or interests using a 100-point scale.
The share of voice numbers for configured brands always add up to 100% and are grouped into four levels:
Less than 25%
25% to 50%
51% to 75%
Greater than 75%
The share of voice enhancement doesn’t require any additional setup. As with affinity enrichments, users will see the updated share of voice experience automatically.
The following figure shows the aggregate share of voice for configured brands and interests:
You can also see share of voice for configured brands and interests on individual customer pages:
Sign up for a free Dynamics 365 Customer Insights trial to experience how you can enrich your customer profiles with affinities and share of voice. We invite you to try these new feature enhancements and let us know about your experience.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Automatic assignment of incoming service requests is one of the most powerful capabilities of unified routing, benefiting customers as well as agents and management. A common customer pain point is waiting for a long time to reach an agent, only to find out that the agent is unable to solve the issue. Precise automated assignment directly impacts key KPIs like first call resolution, customer satisfaction, and agent satisfaction. On the management side, the system can determine the best agent to assign to a case, removing the need for supervisors to constantly monitor queues.
How automatic assignment works
To assign incoming service requests from all channels to the best-suited agent, unified routing evaluates the following information until it finds a match:
Static characteristics of the agents, such as skills, proficiency, working hours, and location
The dynamic characteristic of real-time capacity
Aspects of the incoming work, such as answers to pre-chat questions, virtual agent interactions, customer journey context, and required skills
Unified routing first looks at the incoming service request and any responses to bots, IVR, pre-chat surveys, and so on, and classifies or “enriches” the service request using machine learning models or logical rules. This step helps in identifying details like incident category, severity, and priority; determining the best support center from the customer’s location; and recognizing related records.
Next, the system uses the enriched information to find the most appropriate agent, as expressed in terms of assignment rules. Unified routing supports multiple assignment rules, executing them one after another until a suitable match is found. Matching can produce three results:
Only one agent matches all the criteria. The system assigns the work to the agent.
Multiple agents match the criteria. The system ranks them against one another, based on their capacity, proficiency, or experience, or simply assigns them in a round robin fashion.
No agents match the criteria. The system provides an option to relax the criteria, or constraints. We call this “gradual relaxation of constraints.” Unified routing evaluates the next matching expression, repeating the process until at least one agent matches.
What happens if the automatically assigned agent rejects the assignment or isn’t available? The system tries to reassign the work on its own, supplemented by supervisor intervention, when needed. Unified routing respects the supervisor’s assignment, so if a supervisor wants to step in and assign work to an agent, they can always do so.
With automatic assignment, unified routing helps improve CSAT while lowering the total cost of ownership, removing the need for constant queue supervision.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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More and more companies are bringing their databases to the cloud, now you want to take this step too!? But what is the right way and which is the right target platform, how do we get our data there? How much power do we need for our application? This is exactly where I would like to start with this episode – the preparation – finding the right SKU for your target environment and how you get data with the help of the Azure Migration Assistant and the Azure Data Studio. In this episode of Data Exposed: MVP Edition, Bjoern Peters and Anna Hoffman show you how easy it is and how easy it is to get results.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Across the manufacturing industry, pressure continues to rise as organizations and their workforces balance unpredictable supply chains, complex regulatory and compliance requirements, advanced security threats, and heightened competition. At Microsoft, we are working to empower all manufacturing workers, from the factory floor to the customer’s door, with the solutions they need for sustainable growth and increased productivity.
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