How to start learning Nintex K2 as a beginner — is SharePoint required?

Hi AliMamdouh, welcome to the community! I can confidently answer at least your first question and let you know that SharePoint is absolutely NOT required to work with K2. K2 is a stand-alone platform that is capable of integrating with SharePoint along with a number of other tools/platforms.

Your other questions are quite broad - perhaps you can help us narrow down answers by telling us a little of what you are hoping to get out of the K2 platform? 

​@tbyrne777 
Thank you for the quick response and for confirming that SharePoint is not required — that is very helpful!

To narrow things down: my company uses K2 in an enterprise environment and I have been asked to work on building and automating business workflows. My background is Java backend development (3 years), so I am comfortable with REST APIs, service layers, databases, and object-oriented design — but I have zero experience with K2 or any workflow platform.

Specifically, what I am hoping to get out of K2:

1. Build and manage end-to-end automated workflows (approvals, notifications, task routing)
2. Integrate K2 workflows with external systems via REST APIs — and potentially expose our Java backend services inside K2
3. Work with Smart Objects and understand how K2 handles data
4. Be productive and useful to my team as quickly as possible — my deadline is July 1, 2026

With that context, my main questions are:
- Which Nintex University learning paths should I follow, and in what order? (I can see: Business Analysts, Citizen Developers, IT Developers, Power Users, Server Administrators)
- As a developer, should I skip the Business Analysts and Citizen Developers paths and go straight to IT Developers, or is it important to follow them in order?
- Is the official 75-lesson K2 YouTube course still relevant and up to date?

Thank you again — any guidance is really appreciated!

I would recommend starting with the IT Developers Path - there is some overlap with the Citizen and Business Analyst paths, but for your role I think IT Developers path will be comprehensive enough to get you started. Nothing beats hands-on experience, though, so hopefully you have some small workflow processes/forms you can start with without jumping into something complex right away. Then, you can always rely on us here at the community to help answer questions as you get started!

​@tbyrne777  Okay, Thanks.

​@tbyrne777  please can you give me the link of this path to start from it?

This is it here: https://learn.nintex.com/app/learning_paths/f25b666f-1688-4607-9a91-e6585da7d7c7/summary

Hi ​@AliMamdouh 

Perhaps you’ll find this useful as well: https://community.nintex.com/p/nintexautomation