There is a large and slightly cynical market in paid Microsoft 365 Copilot courses right now, and my main practical advice about all of them is to exhaust this free material first. Microsoft's own learning paths are better maintained than anything a third party can produce, for the simple reason that the people writing them can see the release notes before you can. Copilot has been changing shape roughly every quarter, and every paid Copilot course I have looked at contains at least one section describing a UI that no longer exists. The Learn modules get corrected.
That alone settles the question of where to start. The business user track is the part most people want, and it is competently built. You work through grounding, meaning how Copilot uses your organisation's own files, email and meetings against how it uses the web, then through a prompting framework, then through the individual applications. PowerPoint from planning to delivery, Word for drafting from existing documents, Excel including the Python and forecasting work, Teams meeting facilitation and recaps, and Outlook triage.
The agent layer, including things like the Writing Coach, Analyst and Facilitator agents, is now woven through rather than bolted on, which reflects where the product has actually gone. If you have a Copilot licence sitting unused because your first few attempts produced bland paragraphs, an afternoon here will fix that. The gains are real and they are mostly about knowing what data Copilot can see and how to point it at the right subset. The administrator material deserves more attention than it gets.
Modules on the Microsoft 365 admin centre, Purview, sensitivity labels, conditional access and the data protection story around Copilot are the closest thing to genuinely important content in the whole catalogue, because the single most common way Copilot deployments go wrong is oversharing. If your SharePoint permissions were sloppy for a decade, Copilot is an extremely efficient tool for surfacing that fact to everyone in the company. Microsoft's own training says this out loud, which I respect, and the security and compliance track covers what to fix before you turn it on. IT staff should treat that as required reading rather than optional.
Now the limits, and they are structural rather than fixable. This is training produced by the company selling the licence, and it is written from the assumption that using Copilot is the correct answer. You will not find a module on when the output is not worth trusting, when a human should just write the email, how to evaluate whether Copilot actually saved your team any time, or what the failure modes of summarisation are when the source material is contradictory. Those are the questions a thoughtful person asks after a month of use, and you will have to answer them elsewhere.
You also learn Microsoft's prompting vocabulary rather than anything portable. Nothing in these modules will help you understand why models hallucinate or how retrieval works, and if you switch employers to somewhere running Google Workspace, most of it evaporates. The credential situation is genuinely confusing and Microsoft has not helped itself. There are free Applied Skills assessments, which are lab based and test whether you can complete real tasks, and those are the most honest thing on offer.
There are MS numbered courses like MS-4004 for use cases and MS-4018 for the drafting and analysis path, which exist mostly so training partners have something to sell in a classroom. And there is now AB-900, a proctored fundamentals certification for Copilot and agent administration, which is a real Microsoft certification with an exam fee. If you want something a recruiter recognises, AB-900 is the one, and it is aimed at administrators rather than end users. If you just want to be better at your job, do the free paths and ignore the badges entirely, because nobody outside a Microsoft partner has ever been hired on the strength of a Copilot learning path completion.
My honest summary is that this is well made vendor training that does exactly what vendor training should do, delivered free, and my 3.6 is not a criticism of the execution so much as a statement about the ceiling. You cannot learn about artificial intelligence from the company trying to sell you a subscription to it, but you can certainly learn to use the subscription properly, and a surprising number of organisations are paying for licences that nobody has been shown how to use. Fixing that is worth an afternoon.