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Microsoft 365 Administrator

Run the platform the business lives in — identity, email, Teams, files, and the policies that keep them safe.

Read this before you tick anything

This is a plan, not a qualification. Nobody completes it in order, plenty of people get hired halfway down it, and some finish the whole thing and still have a hard search. It tracks how much of this plan you have worked through — nothing more, and specifically not how employable you are. There is no score, no streak, and nothing here is a deadline.

The roadmap

Written as an order because the earlier stages genuinely make the later ones easier — not because skipping one is forbidden.

  1. Stage 1

    Learn the platform from the admin side

    Spin up a free Microsoft 365 Developer/trial tenant and work through Microsoft Learn's free M365 admin paths. Break things in your tenant, not someone's business.

  2. Stage 2

    Ground the concepts

    Earn Microsoft SC-900 — security, compliance, and identity are the ideas every M365 decision hangs on, and it's the cheapest credible signal you can put on a resume.

    Study guide: Microsoft SC-900 →

  3. Stage 3

    Build a documented tenant

    In your lab tenant: users and groups, licensing, conditional access, a Teams/SharePoint structure with sane sharing, and an Intune-enrolled device. Write it up — that document is your portfolio. MD-102 validates the endpoint half.

    Study guide: Microsoft MD-102 →

  4. Stage 4

    Earn it from the help desk

    Take every M365 ticket you can, become the escalation person for Exchange and Teams problems, then apply for junior M365/collaboration admin roles inside and outside your company.

Skills this path is built on

Tick what you can already do. Most people arrive with more of these than they expect — especially the foundational ones, which are the part everyone skips and then has to come back for.

Certifications

Evidence for a direction you have already chosen, in the order they stop being premature. You do not need all of them, and buying the next one is rarely the answer to a stalled search.

Start here

Microsoft SC-900

Security, compliance, and identity fundamentals — the concepts M365 administration is built on, and the right fundamentals entry now that MS-900 is retired.

Level up

Microsoft MD-102

Endpoint Administrator — the associate cert proving you can manage devices with Intune, the step up from fundamentals.

Retired — read first

MS-900 (Retired)

Microsoft retired the old M365 fundamentals exam on March 31, 2026. If it was on your plan, read this before studying toward a dead exam.

Try the work

Worth doing before the first certification rather than after it. Finding out you dislike this is a genuinely useful result, and far cheaper here than after an exam voucher.

60–90 minutes · Free

Administer a real Microsoft 365 tenant: create users and groups, assign licenses, and set a sharing policy — the actual daily work, not a simulation.

Requires creating a free Microsoft account and a Microsoft 365 Developer/trial tenant. Fully local fallback: map your own household's accounts, sharing, and permissions on paper as an admin design exercise.

More weekend trials →

Your data

Every tick is saved to this browser the moment you make it. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and progress on other paths is kept separately — switching plans never erases one.

All plans The full Microsoft 365 Administrator guide