How to Become a Power BI Developer in 2022?

How to Become a Power BI Developer in 2022?

Power BI development professionals are in high demand around the globe. This job title ensures a deeper understanding of the position’s fundamental needs, tasks, and responsibilities. 

The role of a Power BI Developer or Power BI Analyst is to identify the business’s reporting needs and combine them into visually appealing dashboards and reports. They must understand how to query a data source and present information persuasively.

Training in Power BI can give you the answer to “How to become a Power BI developer?” while clearing the basics, and certifying you as a developer. Let’s dive deep into the world of Power BI and understand what it’s all about.

Business Intelligence – Its relevance in today’s time!

Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that includes tools and techniques used to break data down into valuable information and actionable insights. The BI has three distinct layers or components. The first one deals with the data source where the entire raw data of an organization is stored. This data is generally complex, unstructured, and challenging to search and understand.

The second layer of BI is data warehousing which helps standardize the data into a rational format in order to make it easily searchable. Warehousing also plays a crucial role in organizing the data and performing ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Loading).

The third layer is the one where Power BI developers come in. In this layer, they analyze the data and form business-oriented reports and custom dashboards that allow users to access information. 

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a Business Intelligence application developed by Microsoft and released in 2014. The primary objective of this application is to provide the most accurate depictions of the data, facilitate the creation of customized dashboards and reports, and provide knowledge nuggets. Power BI is packed with tons of features and provides developers huge flexibility in designing the dashboards. 

The following are some of the most notable features of Power BI: 

• Content packs: Content packs include an information model, embedded questions, and dashboard reports leveraged by many applications. 
• Standard language QA: This is one of the most important aspects of Power BI. It allows you to submit questions and provides answers by delivering content that meets our needs. 
• Data Sources: Power BI supports a variety of data sources, including structured and unstructured data, SQL Server, online records, CSV, and Excel. It is perceived reciprocally. 
• Customized perception: Power BI enables you to access the custom perception library that assists in meeting your evolving demands. 
• This revolutionary component can help print dashboards so they may be used in talks and executive meetings. 

Why Should You Pursue a Career As a Power BI Developer?

Suppose you are a computer science student seeking employment opportunities. In that case, you are likely familiar with full-stack development, front-end development, data scientists, artificial intelligence, data analysis, and information security as career options. However, you can also pursue a Power BI developer profession to enhance your existing analytical skills and use them to deliver greater insights for businesses. 

A Power BI developer generates and develops business intelligence reports that offer decision-making insights. This developer position requires extensive knowledge of business intelligence, data integration, data warehousing, modeling, database administration, and the technical aspects of BI systems. 

Some Important Points of Consideration

Roles And Responsibilities

The primary objectives and responsibilities of a Power BI developer are to provide a thorough summary of vast volumes of data for use by decision-makers to make prompt, informed judgments. 

The Power BI Developer is also responsible for organizing and transforming the data necessary for reporting in a suitable format. 

• Designing and Developing Power BI reports
• Implementing row-level security on data to simplify the design and coding regarding security
• Creating KPI scorecards, visual reports, and interactive dashboards using Power BI desktop
• Importing and transforming data for business intelligence
• Creating analysis services reporting models
• Managing design methodology and developing project documentaries
• Developing tabular and multidimensional compatible with the standards of data warehouse
• Creating DAX queries in Power BI desktop

Knowledge and Areas of Expertise Required in Power BI

To pursue a career in Power BI, one must have an extensive understanding of MS Excel. Power BI resembles and functions like an advanced version of Excel. 

• Data Modeling is the most crucial component of Power BI visualization. Therefore, you must be familiar with data modeling methodologies. 
• DAX formulae are similar to Excel formulas; you must have a solid understanding of DAX formulas. 
• Power Query is used to alter data in order to organize it according to the demands of the users; hence, Power Query expertise is required. 
• Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most necessary expertise to get data from relational databases. 
• The most important skill required for the Power BI role is creating interactive dashboards. 

Salary Range 

Power BI provides lucrative career opportunities. One can hire a Power BI professional for different roles and job titles within an organization. 

The following is a list of job titles and their related wages. 

• The average salary of a Data Analyst is $65,000 per annum. 
• The average salary of a Business Intelligence (BI) Developer is $82,885 per year. 
• The average salary of a Power BI Developer is $104,668 per annum. 

(Note: The pay scales mentioned above are based on the current industry and market standards.) 

What Are the Vital Prerequisites for a Power BI Developer?

• Requirement gathering: Power BI professionals must have good requirement gathering and communications skills. They must understand business requirements and translate them into Power BI.
  
• Data modeling: A knowledge of data modeling is required to structure the data according to the business needs. A Power BI developer must have a good understanding of how relationships between the tables work.
• ETL (Extract-Transform-Load): A basic understanding of the ETL process on how the data is extracted from the source systems, transformed, and loaded in Power BI is useful.
• DAX: Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a formula language of Power BI that is used to implement calculations. Proficiency in DAX is a must.
  
• MS Excel: Proficiency in MS Excel is essential since Power BI evolved from Excel and most DAX formulas are similar to it.
  
• Overlapping Skills: Prior experience with any self-service application such as Tableau or Qlik is preferred but not mandatory.
• Visualizations: Best visualization practices will help create visually appealing and business-centric dashboards. 

What Are the Steps Required to Master Power BI?

Join a Program: Familiarize Yourself with the Power BI UI

Installing and familiarizing yourself with the interface of Power BI is the initial step in learning the software. Microsoft offers Power BI as a free download. 

After installing Power BI, you can acquaint yourself with the interface’s primary components. The following resources will assist you with this: 

• Enroll in a Free training program.
• Microsoft provides a quickstart guide as a navigational aid for learning Power BI. 
• Familiarize yourself with the user interface. Your objective should be to begin working with real data as early as possible.

Once you have learned the basics about Power BI and its components, you can join a paid program to understand the deep concepts and advanced features associated with Power BI.

• Enroll in an Instructor-led training program.
• An advanced instructor-led training program will quickly provide you with all the required knowledge regarding the crucial concepts of Power BI.
• This engaging training will teach you step-by-step all the concepts and functionalities of Power BI while providing you with hands-on practice sessions. With these hands-on training sessions, you can easily learn how to become a Power BI Developer and utilize its services. 

Get Certification

After gaining knowledge in all of the core Power BI capabilities, you might be well-prepared to take the PL-300 certification test! 

The primary competencies you will need for the test are: 

• Loading the data 
• Simulation of the data 
• Data visualization and analysis 
• Distributing assets (Managing files and workspaces) 

Create a Strong Portfolio

Once you have mastered all of Power BI’s primary tools, you might need to create a portfolio showcasing your end-to-end skills. A portfolio is a collection of finished projects you can show potential employers on your Github profile, resume, or personal website. 

This process includes: 

• Finding and importing a dataset into Power BI 
• Using Power Query Editor to cleanse the data. 
• Building robust data models 
• Use DAX to create calculated Measures and Columns 
• Designing  visualizations in the form of various Charts and Tables 
• Publish visualizations onto the Power BI Service

Different Types of Power BI Versions and Editions

There are currently three editions of Power BI: 

• Microsoft Power BI Desktop / Free 
• Microsoft Power BI Professional 
• Premium Microsoft Power BI 

What is Power BI Desktop? 

Power BI Desktop is the version of Power BI that you install on your local system/computer to access Power BI’s basic functionalities. It is available for free download and is the optimal version, to begin with, regardless of your skill level. Power BI Desktop version allows you to connect to more than seventy data sources, analyze data, publish to the web, export to Excel, and much more. 

What is Power BI Professional? 

Power BI Pro is the extended version of Power BI Desktop, including the ability to create dashboards and reports. It also makes reading, sharing, and consumption of your generated reports available (and the ones provided by others), which is not available with the Power BI Desktop. 

The most significant distinction between Power BI Pro and the Free version is the ability to share data, reports, and dashboards with many other people who also have a Power BI Pro subscription and the ability to establish an app-based workspace. In addition, Power BI Pro has a 10 GB data storage restriction per Pro user, but Power BI Free does not. 

What is Premium Power BI? 

The Power BI Premium license is not per-user like the Free and Pro licenses. Instead, Power BI Premium licenses give a dedicated capacity unit for all organization users. One may utilize this particular space (also known as Premium Workspace) to host huge datasets up to 50GB while providing 100TB of total cloud storage. 

It allows your organization to utilize its own dedicated capacity and hardware instead of Microsoft’s shared capacity. However, you will need to establish this capacity precisely and verify that it can accommodate your reporting and analytical requirements. Properly sizing this ability provides for considerably more scalability and improved performance. Microsoft provides three Premium capacity options, each with a unique amount of virtual cores and memory space.

Why Do Associations and Organizations Use Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is one of the robust data visualization and business analytics tools that helps organizations of all types and sizes to bridge the gap between data and efficient decision-making. Here are some of the reasons why associations and organizations use Power BI:

• Power BI is simple to use and offers access to multiple advanced functionalities with a little knowledge about the basic skills required for it.
• You can access Power BI reports from anywhere, anytime, with the help of your device and a stable internet connection.
• Sharing dashboards created in Power BI within departments is easy. Consequently, it enables collaboration and innovation among the employees to form effective business strategies.
• Power BI ensures end-to-end security of the data and analytics through double encryption. It helps organizations in creating and sharing data analytics with confidence.

Conclusion

If you have made it up to this point (and we hope you did), you might have got an idea about how to become a Power BI Developer. We have tried to inculcate all the crucial details regarding Power BI in this informational piece. However, we understand that a blog might not clear all the concepts completely.

Therefore, if you are interested in this field and want to pursue a career in it, you can try any of our Power BI training programs that will help you learn all the core concepts related to Power BI. Our detailed courses will guide you through all the sections step-by-step to help you become a pro in Power BI.