 This is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat interview and I'm talking today with Alexio. Hello. Hi, Christian. Yeah, hello, everyone. I'm Alexio Chandwana, best in Essex, England. That's great. Yeah, as I usually say, it's like for people that don't know you, like who you are, what do you do? And you've already said where you are. So what do you do for a living? Yeah, so I'm a solution designer for BMW in the United Kingdom. Oh, do you take home free samples? I wish. I was, you know, and it's funny as I like my early 20s, I was so excited. I wanted to go buy like I was really into sobs at the time. Back when that was like a thing and I just thought they were just so beautiful and different and how it was less expensive to actually travel over to Europe, buy it new, drive it across the country to a port, put it on a ship, fly myself home, wait the 12 weeks or whatever till it shipped over and then to pick it up at the port and drive it home. All of that was cheaper than just going to the car lot and buying one new here in the US. And I don't know if that's the same thing, like can you get a deal? Is there an employee discount? Yeah, so yeah, the employees get cars by the way. So yeah, the perk right there was very cool. So here and how long have you been in MVP now? I'm still counting days. I think 22 days now. Congratulations. Thank you. That's always very exciting for the and I again, I do like to point out that I don't just interview brand new MVPs, but so you got your business applications MVP, but I do talk to people that have been MVPs for a long time as well. So what was your path to becoming an MVP? Yeah, so from my path, coming into tech without any university background or tech background, starting my journey on Facebook, chatting with Ben Volma, getting some guidance from Ben, and then eventually getting into tech, right? So at this point, it was the community aspect of it where I've never known who Ben was, but he was there to help me out. So from my perspective, I decided to help others onto the path of tech, how they can get on onto the power platform or the Microsoft tech in itself. So decided to create a user group, which is a power platform Africa. So we have 237 active new learners. Wow. Power platform. That's fantastic. Congrats. Yeah. So great. Yeah. So we have people, of course, the name is Power Platform Africa, but it is for everybody. So we have 21 students in the Americas. We have students in the UK. We have some students in Africa and 102 based from the Middle East. So the whole idea was to kind of get them started of what the technology is. So of course, you don't want to force them to kind of lend the technology, right? So the first thing I always look to do is to explain what the power platform is, what dynamic is all about, or what's involved within Microsoft. So from there on, because I focus mainly on Power Platform and Dynamics 365 CE, introduce them to the Microsoft course, which is on a university before getting to Microsoft LEN. So it gives them a guided path to create an app, right? So once they have an app, they get your point where they feel confident or they think, okay, no, no, this is not for me, right? So what I have, I have a calendar. They have access to my calendar, Mondays and Thursday between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. So similar setup to yourself. Yeah. So the book time in we discuss what challenges they're seeing, what they think about the technology, where they want to take it to. And then on Saturdays, we have sessions where we actually demo some of the components and what they need to understand to build the foundation of the technology. And then in some occasions, we invite other speakers to come and speak about the technology best practices, what things to look out for, what are employers looking for? So yeah, so we keep going with that cycle. This year, we've managed to get eight people in the UK and America's into employment. And so far, I can confirm eight of them have passed their probation periods, and they're doing well. So yeah, it's a cycle to help others. So when I started, it was about giving back to the community, making sure people see the opportunity and what Microsoft Tech can actually do for them. So it's not just a power platform. In some cases, someone says, oh, I want to learn Office 365. Okay, I'm not a specialist at it. So what I always do is reach out to the community on Twitter, ask if there's someone available to help, and then connect the two people, the experienced person and the learner, and then get them going and also just check in to see how they're getting on. You know, the hardest part for somebody coming in that wants to learn about that is just like being nervous about reaching out to somebody like you, you know, anybody within the community is like, they're like, you have to get past that barrier. And look, if people are too busy, you know, like if I got a bunch of things that's going on with my day job or family or things around there, I may not respond right away or I might just say, it's like, Hey, what you're really looking for something it's beyond what I can help you with like a right now. But hey, let me plug you in or let me introduce you to somebody around that. I mean, that's the connectedness of the community is something that is just incredibly powerful. And I always say this, and I'm sure you said the same thing. If I don't know the answer to your question, I probably know somebody who does and and so can introduce you there. And so get plugged in, get started that way. The other side of it is that there's so much content that's out there. That's part of the community. And so and while I can't speak for your community, but I imagine you're pretty welcoming to anybody that wants to sit in and get involved. And if they feel like, you know, of like minded and are excited by in the community that that you've built there, they'll stay plugged in. It's just there's so much that's happening virtually now. Like just find that birds of a feather, find that that group of people where you feel comfortable and then just have these conversations and people learn more faster, you know, more completely around these these platforms as part of a community than you would ever do, like go and try and figure it out yourselves. Yep. So yeah. So the critical point is, yeah, someone saying, okay, I'm not too sure about this, or I want to learn this. So in some cases, it's kind of breaking it down. So of course, you can talk about Azure being the foundation of the Microsoft tech. And then being not an expert at that tech, then look for someone to kind of help them out. Because I've had two students come up and they say, okay, this whole platform and dynamic is not for me. I just want to know about Azure. So again, to make sure they feel part of that community, you're not kind of saying, okay, this is not for you. Get someone in, they sit on it, they start learning together. And the outcome from that is a few more others then raise their hand up. Oh, I want to have a look at that as well. So you're kind of opening up the opportunity by keeping them on board and then asking a community colleague to come and join us as well. You know, and this is more kind of a question. So there's there's an individual over and the kind of the collaboration side, the SharePoint and Teams world who Vlad Katronescu, who's a really good friend who his blog is. So if you go and look up Vlad Katronescu, you can find him. Yeah. Very popular out there has tons of learning courses and things that he's done with Pluralsight and elsewhere. But one of the things that he does that's really powerful is his blog is a primary resource for training materials. He has gone and said, well, if you want to go and get certification, if you want to, you know, back in the Microsoft master days when they had those programs around. But if you want to go towards these certifications, he provides guidance on free and paid training, the various the books that are out there, resources that are online for that. I don't know if something like that is comprehensively of as what Vlad is built exists over in the power platform. That's actually maybe an opportunity for you or somebody else out there to go and compile all the resources so that there's a one place to go to where you could point and say, hey, you're interested in going and becoming an expert here materials. Here's the Microsoft certification courses. And yes, those cost occasionally there, there's free offerings and things out there. But there's a lot of the there's a lot of the learning out there like you mentioned, there's there's edX and Udemy and other training resources, which are free. And you're constantly seeing like certifications in Azure specifically of people out there via LinkedIn and other social channels sharing like, hey, I just got my so my certification, all of those things which lead up and will help towards those formal Microsoft certifications, which are fantastic on your resume. Well, all of those things are and building up those schools, those skills. But there's a, you know, again, there are resources out there. There is a path forward. If you don't have a dollar to spend, you can still get started and start building and learning and get these certifications all within the cloud, all for free, and then tap into the community. There's just so much that's available these days. Yeah, so one of the things which we have encouraged most of the learners is once they're comfortable is to sign up to the fundamentals exams for Power Platform, which is a PL 900, which Microsoft currently generally is giving it for free at the moment. You attend the webinar, you learn, you go see the exam. So we have quite a few of them. We've gone to attend the exam one or two have failed, but they never gave up. They went back in and passed the exams. So I think the idea of having either a site with those links to those resources will be really useful. So it's definitely something I'll take on board and I'll put that on my blog. So I also have a blog, which is a alexandwana.co.uk. So I'll put that on the page and then share with the community, anyone who wants to kind of dig deep dive into the resources and see what the Power Platform and Dynamics has to offer. And if somebody's watching this video too out on YouTube or finding it via other social, of course, you can also go to, I'll provide all the links to all of Alexio's contact information and his blog, Adam Buckley Planet. And so the the MVP Buzz Chat series. At the top of my blog, I have a link list of all of the interviews of all the MVPs as well. So you can scan through and you can see, like again, all the business applications, MVPs, office apps and services like myself, enterprise mobility, which is you think of like the config manager and kind of all the other, you know, IT pro type capabilities. So and plenty of other MVPs across multiple areas, bunch of Azure MVPs as well. So it's great to, you know, I love cataloging that and do, again, help shine the light on fellow MVPs and the things that they're doing. So what else is going on? What else? Like, are you doing other events? Is there anything that you're really passionate about right now that we could highlight? Yeah, so for me, one thing to highlight is the community has kind of helped me to kind of keep challenging myself. So back in December, we had a virtual pub in London. We catch up with colleagues from different regions and then came across a colleague based in the US. And believe it or not, this was called Midnight. And I said to him, look, I need to kind of step up a bit more. At the point I was a functional consultant, right? I said, I want to step up a bit more and advance my career. What advice do you have for me? Because to me, the choice is yours, right? You need to tell me what you want to do for me to help you. I said, I want to move to be solution architect. So he goes, okay, no problem. So believe it or not, UK time, because 1 a.m., a colleague says to me, let's set up a team called at 1 a.m. in the morning at that time. So we had a separate call from everyone. And he gave me some guidance on how to actually move from being a functional consultant and what is the expectation as a solution architect. So the advice is to me, you can start as a solution designer, right? See how you feel at that point and then look what is required as an overall solution architect. So if you get stuck, give me a shout and I'll help you. So at that point, that's what pushed me. So I said, you know what, let me go and understand what a solution architect does. So I started asking questions, started reading material, the solution architect material back then it was the MB 600 materials looking at. Then yeah, back in January, decided to apply for a job at this organization I am at now. And now, yeah, I was being truthful to them and said, look, I know the role you're looking for as a solution designer. I'm not experienced enough for it, but I'm happy for the challenge. And yeah, the offer came. And now here I'm still there now, helping with the project moving from on-prem to the cloud. So there's a lot of things to learn. But at the same time, it goes back to the community where someone takes their time away from a pub before they got drunk, right? And they share some information to you. So yeah, so for me, the community is always great. There's a lot of folks in the community. You have Victor Dantas in the US, Chris Huntingford, Trisha Sinclair in the UK. Whenever you need, there's just a small list, but there's quite a long list of colleagues in the community. You need any help. We need advice. They're always there to help. So for me, that community aspect of it goes a long way. And not, as I said, and not being shy, like to reach out and connect, especially if there's somebody that has the MVP title. I mean, we're like, again, I don't want to speak for you. It's like, but if somebody reaches out to me, I'm going to try and help them. Like, please reach out to me if there's, you know, we're, you know, different backgrounds and technical focus. I'm more of a marketing guy, but I've been in tech my entire career. And so I had, you know, occasionally we'll get people and saying, it was like, well, what roles? Like I'm in marketing side of it. I really want to get over in the IT side. Like what opportunities are there? I'm like, well, do you have an hour? Let's, let's have a conversation and really dig in and see what I can do to help there. I don't always have that, that much time open around that, but it could be an ongoing conversation. And again, a series of introductions that could happen, but it all begins with a person like you did saying, Hey, I'm really interested in following this path. Where do I go? Where do I start? And then asking, tapping the community and asking for that help. That's where it begins. Yeah. So, yeah. So for me, now the challenge is to get other folks out there who haven't spoken in the community to say, yeah, come and share your knowledge. Because I've come across some colleagues I've worked with, and they're not so sure how they're going to start in terms of speaking in front of a public. So I'm always kind of encouraging them to look, we all learn every day, right? So whatever you want to share, there's bound to be some people in the crowd who can learn from you. And at the same time, you're sharing your experiences. So experiences are always going to be unique, right? You're not going to have exactly the same experiences on a project. There's always different challenges. So for me, the challenge is to help all the new speakers as much as possible. So looking forward to the Scottish Summit, which is coming up in 2022. I've also signed up to support new speakers. So I'll be supporting new speakers for the event. Yeah, I saw that. I considered submitting to that as well, just because I love, so my family, like we have heavy Scottish roots. And so, in fact, I think it's like 16 generations, I can map back to Enboro. So on my other side. So yeah, the, if your last name, if you're from Scotland or Northern UK, and your last name is Richardson, we're likely related. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, it's, that is a, I'll tell you, that is a challenge to try and get people that have never presented before, who have great experience to get them to come participate. I mean, that's a scary thing to go and do if you've never presented. I mean, any, any kind of guidance on that, what do you do to get people to share, to do it that first time? So in my case, right, I was always scared myself to speak. And then I saw it tweet back a year ago now. No, a year, but two years ago now. And within that tweet, there was an ask to help other people get started. And this was by an MVP in the United States, Mary Thompson. So I had a chat with Mary. So she's getting a team's call, we had a chat and I'll say, look, I would love to speak, but I'm scared. I'm a bit nervous, right? So just to me, there's nothing for you to be scared, what you're sharing. There's someone to learn from it. And at the same time, just be yourself and share it. So one of my first speaking events was that, believe it or not, I did submit to Microsoft Ignite, and I was accepted. So at that point, I was accepted to a table talk. And I was really nervous, but again, the community, the colleagues I had on the panel, they're very supportive and we all kind of assigned each other roles of how we're actually going to communicate that. And then, from there, I then had a mentor based in the UK, Trisha Sinclair, to help me prepare for this talk. So the technique which we used here was for me to write down what I want to speak about, what I'm passionate about, and who the target audience is. So once I write down my submission, share with them. So, okay, what do you think? Do you think I can submit this for this event? Should be like, okay, yeah. But what you put there is not really ideal. So I would encourage you to change it. Go back and change it. Keep asking the question, what do you think I can do? Then after submission, of course, there's a whole wide community who want to speak at these events. So sometimes, you don't get the opportunity. But the opportunities which came my way, because you've got to prepare for the presentation, right? So I'll prepare my presentation if there's a demo, prepare it, then run it through with Trisha, just to make sure I'm comfortable, I'm confident, I'm not missing anything in the presentation. And one thing which I was always losing, timekeeping. Well, and that's why, you know, having the, I mean, one, getting feedback, and that's, again, somewhere, it's a great, exactly, if you outline, you've got your abstract, everything, but if you structure what you want to present, whether you have, you know, 20, 30 minutes to present, or you have 45 to 60 minutes, like a full session to go and do, whether you need to leave time for Q&A at the end, all those kinds of things, but is to go and run through it by yourself, record it on your desktop, and then go back and look at it. The other thing, well, look, it's painful for everyone at every level to watch yourself present and to go back and listen through that. But you can learn from that. One of the, one of the best lessons that I ever had was from a gentleman who was keynote and an event that I put together, where he was doing more of a kind of a business topic in this tech event. And, but he was doing, it was a fantastic keynote. He had a person sitting there in the audience that came with him, and essentially was going through, this was a new keynote that he was giving. And it was sitting there and taking notes as he was presenting. And I was like, what are you doing? And he says, well, this, I had this person come along says, I actually paid them. So they're helping him out. So, you know, but this was this guy, he was a, you know, a high priced keynote presenter at this session. He says, but he was taking notes and looking at audience reaction. Did people applaud at the right time? Did, did, how did this land, this joke, this story, this demo, this example that I gave and notes. And he was constantly fine tuning it. I realized that's an extreme case. But that's something that you learn by doing it. And so I would even suggest if it's the first time, like go and capture it, record it, show it to some people or publish it out on YouTube and then point people to and say, can you give me feedback from that? And they could give you say, give me feedback on my presentation skills, as well as the examples of what you thought was funny, what you thought was good, whether the demo, I went down too much in the weeds around this, or I didn't explain enough about something else. It's great to get that kind of feedback, refine that all before you've done it in front of a live audience. So I'd highly recommend that you go and do that. And then again, tap into the community and get feedback from people. Yeah, definitely makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So yeah, we'll give everything to make sure we get more folks who haven't spoken at community events to feel part of this so they can share, because I'm pretty confident we have so many people in the community who have a lot of things to share, but just getting them to be confident to be comfortable. So yeah, we should see so many speakers coming up soon. I know that's a constant thing you think of in business as well as in community. You want to constantly be planning for the future and we're the future leaders, the future voices around that. So we should all be out there constantly looking for and encouraging and supporting people that are coming up through the ranks and learning this. And so I really appreciate your time today, your background, your story, and people that want to get in contact with you, reach out to you. What are the best ways to connect with you? Yeah, so they can connect with me on LinkedIn. So it's Alexio Chanduana. They can also connect with me on Twitter. So that's Alex Chanduana, that's the handle. And at the same time on my blog, Alexchanduana.co.uk, you also have links to contact me from there as well. But anyone who follows on Twitter, LinkedIn, always open to conversation. So I always encourage everyone if you want to have a conversation about the Power Platform or Microsoft Tech, just open up the questions and we can have a discussion. Awesome. Thanks so much. Well, it's great connecting with you. Thanks, Christian. Thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it.