Microbial ecology is currently undergoing a massive transition. To date, as a discipline, it has largely focussed on describing microbial diversity in different environments while making claims about the functional importance of differences between communities. Some microbial ecologists are now attempting to develop a body of theory with the goal of transforming the discipline from a purely descriptive to a more predictive science. The outcome of said attempts could be a greater understanding of the evolutionary and ecological factors driving microbial community assembly and its consequences for ecosystem functioning and stability. Plant ecology has gone, and continues to go, through a similar transition and offers a variety of promising approaches. Many of these approaches account for plant traits, either explicitly or implicitly, and some afford predictions in a probabilistic framework. Taking lessons from this literature offers two promising and complementary paths for advancing microbial ecology. First, our understanding of microbial functional diversity and resilience will benefit from using theoretical and empirical models in a trait-based framework of community assembly. Second, in terrestrial systems, it may be possible to scale up the consequences of microbial community shifts by incorporating ecophysiological approaches that explicitly target plant traits. In this talk I will discuss these approaches further, using examples from my work and that of other researchers.