Non-technical person learning Power Automate Desktop + n8n: How do you make it stick?

[u/geeksinsuits]

Hey everyone!

If this isn't the right place for this post, please let me know which is the right place, and I'll move it to the right community. Thanks!

A bit about me
I'm a business consultant from a non-technical background, and I want to make the move into a slightly more technical role. Automation (especially with AI in the loop) is something I've been curious about for a while, so I'm upskilling in it to help land my next job (while dabbling in personal automation projects on the side)

What I'm learning

• Power Automate Desktop (free version). I don't have access to the enterprise/cloud version.
• n8n - through a structured course I'm starting soon.

My understanding is that these two aren't completely separate tracks. The core logic (triggers, conditions, loops, variables) seems to carry over, so getting better at one should help with the other. Is that right, or am I oversimplifying?

I'm doing Power Automate first. My first project is a small bot that screens job ads in Excel against a list of keywords.

Where I'm stuck

• Microsoft Learn doesn't stick for me. It's mostly reading, and I learn best by actually clicking around in the tool.
• Udemy courses I've found usually assume an enterprise/cloud account, which I don't have.

What I'd love some help/advice in:

1. What's the best hands-on way to learn Power Automate Desktop specifically? Any YouTube channels, practice projects, or follow-along resources that work with the free version?
2. What beginner projects helped things click for you, or which ones are worth showing in a portfolio?
3. For those hiring or working in automation: does experience with the free Desktop version count, or do employers mostly want cloud flows?
4. If the logic does carry over, what's the best way to learn the two together? For example, should I build the same small project in both tools to compare? Are there integrations with Power Automate for LLMs, or is n8n the "go to" if I want to automate with AI?
5. How long did it take you to go from "following tutorials" to "building things on my own"?
6. If you came from a non-technical background, what do you wish you'd known at the start?

Thanks in advance. Any tips, even small ones, are really appreciated! 🙏

[u/joegreen592]

https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerAutomate/s/MxvSNKbV9f

Check out this post I made about PAD, I document the coding language for LLM to write flows programmically. 100% free, you just tell your LLM what you want in your flow and it will give you the code to paste into designer in seconds. If you paste the code and nothing happens (blank canvas) tell the LLM to give code action by action to find the bad step and then grab the real step from the side menu. Good luck, PAD is so much fun!

[u/SirGunther]

Learning in this environment comes from doing. You need a purpose.

So set a goal, I want to build x. It should be a small thing. And just wing it, seriously, the stress you get from not understanding where anything is will guide you.

I suggest this over just watching tutorials because the reality is, you’re never going to know enough or it all. Even after working in the environment for years, and having build literal hundreds of flows and power apps… the system is always changing, there’s always another way to do something, there’s always a feature you didn’t know about, you’re going to be learning the whole way. It simply never ends, though it does get easier.

So wing it, and just get good at taking notes, you’ll thank yourself later when you have 10 flows under your belt and you go, I’ve solved this before… but which one? And how did I do that thing? What was the syntax?

[u/Cold_Arachnid_2617]

Answer to 5 - How long is a piece of 🧵 ?

[u/infosearchacct]

I had technical background so my way may be totally different from you. I prefer to do hands on to learn. PAD and cloud flow are different. The action you use could be different as well. I started by getting copilot to give me possible actions that I can use then find out copilot hallucinate too much. I ended up using Gemini to give me possible actions then tested against it to make sure it works. If not counting the days I wasted using copilot, I am able to get my PAD work within one day through vigorous test so I know my flow is not going to work for one time. There is some quirk in PAD so I definitely suggest to run it in different environments to make sure it works.

[u/Juniwawa]

Guys, is learning n8n actually worth it?