As Microsoft Partners think about the capability they will need next, there is an opportunity to look beyond traditional hiring models and consider how early-career talent can be supported and developed more deliberately within the business.
At 19, Tom Coutts is one of the youngest learners to take part in #BCTalent, and his development started straight from college.
Tom joined The HBP Group, a Microsoft Partner in the UK, in September 2025 with no previous accounting or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central experience. Since then, he has gained experience across different departments, achieved his accounting accreditation and passed the MB-800 exam, all while developing his skills through #BCTalent.
Now working as a Trainee Dynamics 365 Business Central Service Desk Analyst, his experience offers an early example of what it can look like when structured learning is combined with exposure to the realities of a partner environment.
We spoke to Tom about his experience so far, what he has learned and how his career in the Business Central ecosystem is developing.
Tell us a little about yourself and your work and education before joining #BCTalent.
“I am 19 years old and from England. I joined The HBP Group straight from college in September 2025, with no previous accounting or Business Central experience.
Since joining, I have worked across a number of different departments while developing my skills and working towards my accounting accreditation, which I passed in May 2026. I then went on to pass the MB-800 in August 2026.”
Why did you decide to join #BCTalent?
“I decided to join #BCTalent as it was the most appealing route to gaining my MB-800 accreditation for both The HBP Group and me. From the start, it was clear that #BCTalent was about more than just Business Central, with a big focus on personal development alongside technical skills.”
What have you enjoyed learning most?
“I have particularly enjoyed learning how the different areas of Business Central work together. Understanding the wider system and how it can be applied to real-world business scenarios has been really interesting.”
What has been the biggest challenge so far?
“The biggest challenge has been balancing my #BCTalent learning with my responsibilities at work. As a trainee, I have been working across different departments and taking on lots of different tasks, so maintaining good progress with #BCTalent alongside performing well at work has required good time management.”
What has helped you learn the most?
“The clearly mapped-out learning path has been really useful, but the weekly masterclass sessions have probably helped me the most. Learning from experienced professionals and seeing Business Central applied in real-world scenarios made a big difference to my understanding.”
How confident do you feel now compared with when you started?
“I feel a lot more confident now. #BCTalent has helped me develop a broad understanding of Business Central and given me confidence that I would not have expected to gain in such a short space of time.”
What has surprised you most about Business Central?
“Its size. Until I started learning about Business Central, I did not realize how big the system actually is or how much there was to learn. The more I have learned, the more I have realized there is still so much to explore.”
What has been your biggest achievement so far?
“Passing the MB-800 exam. It was something I had been working towards alongside my responsibilities at work, so passing it was a really rewarding achievement.”
What advice would you give to someone considering a career in Business Central?
“I would say that it can be done in a short space of time with hard work. I started straight from college with no experience, and I am now a trainee consultant in just over a year. You do not need to know everything from the beginning. Being willing to learn, ask questions and put the effort in is what matters most.”
Rethinking how Business Central capability is built
The more interesting question for Microsoft Partners is not whether emerging talent can be developed. It is how deliberately that development is designed around the future shape of the business.
Tom’s experience shows the value of building capability through a combination of structured learning, certification, and exposure to different parts of the partner environment. That creates something broader than technical proficiency alone. It starts to build commercial awareness, customer context, and an understanding of how Business Central operates across functions.
For partners, that opens up a different way of thinking about workforce planning. Rather than viewing early-career talent simply as a pipeline into existing roles, there is an opportunity to nurture individual potential while shaping capability around the work the business expects to deliver next, from support and consulting through to increasingly AI-enabled and cross-functional Business Central environments.
That makes talent development less about filling future vacancies and more about creating the conditions for people to grow alongside the capability needs of the organization.
This is the thinking behind #BCTalent. By combining structured Business Central learning with development that can sit alongside real-world partner experience, the initiative gives partners a framework for supporting early-career professionals as they develop, while building relevant capability within their teams.
Tom’s journey is still at an early stage, but that is precisely what makes it relevant. It shows what that approach can look like in practice when potential is recognized early and given the structure, exposure, and support to develop.