A different way to prepare

Knowledge goes in.
Judgment comes out.

Practiworks turns certification study into a shift on the job. You take the role, the incidents arrive whether you're ready or not, and every decision costs something. By Friday you'll know which calls you can defend.

The approach

Most preparation teaches you to recognise. We teach you to decide.

Question banks are good at one thing: telling you whether you've seen something before. Certification exams stopped asking that a long time ago. They hand you a situation with constraints and four options that are all technically possible, and ask which one a competent practitioner would choose. That's a different skill, and you can't flashcard your way to it.

Conventional prep
A Practiworks track
You are asked to recall a fact.
You are asked to choose between options that are all defensible.
Each question stands alone.
A careless call comes back later as the problem you created.
A wrong answer turns red.
A wrong answer costs capacity and drops your service level.
You practise until you recognise the pattern.
You practise until you can defend the decision.
01

Options that all look right

Every incident offers options that all look reasonable. Choosing well means weighing cost, risk and blast radius against each other. That's what a scenario question tests, and nobody practises it.

02

Consequences that compound

Over-permission an account on day one and you'll be restoring a deleted dataflow on day three. Mistakes chain into follow-up incidents, so the second-order cost of a shortcut is something you feel.

03

Mapped to the objectives

Every scenario maps to a published exam objective. The end-of-week debrief scores you per domain, so you find out where you're thin while there's still time to fix it.

How a track runs

One week. One role. Everything costs something.

A track isn't a course you work through. It's a shift you survive. Half an hour, stop and resume whenever you like, and you're meant to replay it with different choices.

  1. 1

    Clock in

    You take a role at a company that doesn't exist, with a budget that does. A week of work ahead of you, and the previous admin left you their mess.

  2. 2

    Decide

    Incidents arrive day by day. Each one costs something to resolve and moves your service level up or down. There's a clock on your decision, because there always is.

  3. 3

    Debrief

    At the end of the week you get a report: every call you made, why the right answer was right, and your score broken down by exam domain.

Preparation tracks

Pick a certification. Take the shift.

Each track is built around one certification, with its own company, role and set of incidents drawn from the published exam objectives. We started with the Microsoft data platform because that's the work we know best.

Microsoft · Platform administrator

Capacity Command

DP-700 · Fabric Data Engineer
Available now

You're the new Fabric platform admin at Nordwind Logistics. One capacity, three weeks on call, and a queue of incidents that don't wait for you to feel ready.

7 simulated days15 incidents + 3 follow-ups100 CU to spend
Open the track
Microsoft · Analytics engineer

Semantic Drift

DP-600 · Fabric Analytics Engineer
Candidate

A semantic model everyone depends on and nobody trusts. Find out why the numbers moved, and decide what to do about it.

Microsoft · Data analyst

The Reporting Line

PL-300 · Power BI Data Analyst
Candidate

Six stakeholders, one dataset, and a board meeting on Friday. Every shortcut you take is a question you'll be asked.

Microsoft · Cloud administrator

Blast Radius

AZ-104 · Azure Administrator
Candidate

A subscription you inherited, a change window that's too short, and a rollback plan you haven't written yet.

Only Capacity Command is built. The other three are candidates, not commitments, and what people ask for is how we decide what goes next. Want a certification that isn't on this list, inside the Microsoft estate or well outside it? Tell us which one.

The platform is yours now.

3 weeks on call, seven simulated days each, and however many follow-ups your own mistakes create. Find out how much of DP-700 you have in your hands.