I work as a consultant in the Energy sector and had a project management work experience of 6 years at the time I decided to try take the PMP certification. I briefly describe timeline in my successful attempt to get PMP certification. It took me about 25 days of effort and 75 hours of study to clear the PMP exam.
Day 1 - Spoke to my friends and got a general idea of how the PMP certification process works. Went through the PMI website. Registered for an accredited PMP course to get the 35 hours PDU requirement. I selected Joseph Phillips course on Udemy.com. The course is quite fairly well reviewed, comprehensive, and fairly well presented. (Though I now think that the content covered in the course is inadequate in clearing the exam, if one relies solely on this course and its materials. But the course an excellent start to meaningful PMP preparation)
Day 1 to 14 - Completed the PMP course on Udemy.com and downloaded the completion certificate. I would play the course videos at 1.5x speed and used to take notes in “Google Keep” to store it and return to it. I must have spent 30 hours for completing this course over a period of two weeks. I also completed the two diagnostic test at the end of the course and scored 73% and 50% respectively in first attempt (total 5 hours). In the end of chapter exams, my scores were on average 16–19 correct out of 25 questions (first attempt).
Day 14 - I completed my application for PMP exam and submitted to PMI for review. Did no preparation for the next one week as I was waiting for the result of the profile review process from PMI side.
Day 21 - My profile was reviewed (without any audit) and I was allowed to register for the exam. Due to errors in the way my contact number was recorded in my PMI profile, I could schedule the date only after speaking to a customer service agent of PMI to help with the scheduling issue.
Day 23 to 30 - I got an exam slot for 7th Dec and took it. I had borrowed PMP study guide (Kim Heldman 9th edition) from a friend and started going through chapters. The book is not well edited (in my opinion), and I found the language confusing at many places, making reading quite tedious. The end of chapter tests were quite useful. I had earlier noted that (during simulated test), my grasp of project planning and executing process areas were weak. So I read those chapters in the guide. For other sections, I only did the end of chapter test and reviewed the incorrect answers (25 hours).
Day 31 to 34 - I had purchased two sets of practice exams from Udemy.com, one set of Joseph Phillips (Set I - 200 questions) and other of Georgio Dacchache (300 questions) (both purchases were made purely based on user reviews). I attempted the exams and was scoring 68%-75% range in the first attempt. I reviewed all the incorrect answers.
Day 35 (day before exam) - I also accessed the online questions content of Kim Heldman guide from Wiley Online learning (Sybex), where additional 300 questions were available for review. I completed those 300 questions over one day.
Day 34 to 35 - Over the course of two days and morning hours on the exam day, I reviewed all the questions that I had attempted over the course of study and mock exams (PMP course - 400 + 350 end of chapter questions, Exam set I - 200 questions, Georgio Dacchache - 300 questions and Kim Heldman - 500 end of chapter questions and 170 exam questions). I noticed upon review that I tend to forget the answers for the non intuitive questions where knowledge of guide rather than experience is important, so I made sure I imbibe the project management concepts from the notes that I prepared from the online course. I actually never went back to the videos after the completion of the course but was relying on the notes I had prepared based on it.
I reached at the exam venue 45 minutes before the scheduled time (3PM). I wanted to briefly go through the notes and memory sheets (available from the course), but decided against it and promptly went to register for the test. I started my test at 2.45 PM.
The questions in the PMP exam were quite confusing in the choice of answers. The questions were all phrased much better than all of the mock exams I had attempted and was also closer to real work environment situations than the ones I had worked on. Kudos to PMI for preparing a well crafted question set. One could quite easily eliminate two of the answer choices, but the remaining choices both looked to be good answers for the question. This was the major issue that I faced in the exam. This was the case for majority of the confusing questions (which I had marked for review) that I encountered in the real exam.
My work experience also helped me visualize the scenarios of questions and I was thinking of my likely response as a project manager in handling such a situations. Hence, some of my answers were based on my work experience and certainly not based on PMBOK guide based principles. Please avoid this situation. I finished answering 200 questions in 2.35 hours (155 minutes) and reviewed all the answers in next 85 minutes. It was with quite a fearful mind that I clicked on the “Next” button after reviewing the 200th question, knowing that I will be seeing the result at the next page. Luckily for me, I passed. I scored “Above Target” in first three process areas, “On Target” in Monitoring & Controlling process area, and “Below Target” in the Closing process area. Somehow, the ‘Below Target’ score in one of the sections did not jeopardize my overall passing of the exam. I was quite lucky that day.
I had some years of experience writing and doing well in tough competitive exams in India, and that cumulative experience may have helped me clear PMP with minimal but very focused preparation.
Day 1 - Spoke to my friends and got a general idea of how the PMP certification process works. Went through the PMI website. Registered for an accredited PMP course to get the 35 hours PDU requirement. I selected Joseph Phillips course on Udemy.com. The course is quite fairly well reviewed, comprehensive, and fairly well presented. (Though I now think that the content covered in the course is inadequate in clearing the exam, if one relies solely on this course and its materials. But the course an excellent start to meaningful PMP preparation)
Day 1 to 14 - Completed the PMP course on Udemy.com and downloaded the completion certificate. I would play the course videos at 1.5x speed and used to take notes in “Google Keep” to store it and return to it. I must have spent 30 hours for completing this course over a period of two weeks. I also completed the two diagnostic test at the end of the course and scored 73% and 50% respectively in first attempt (total 5 hours). In the end of chapter exams, my scores were on average 16–19 correct out of 25 questions (first attempt).
Day 14 - I completed my application for PMP exam and submitted to PMI for review. Did no preparation for the next one week as I was waiting for the result of the profile review process from PMI side.
Day 21 - My profile was reviewed (without any audit) and I was allowed to register for the exam. Due to errors in the way my contact number was recorded in my PMI profile, I could schedule the date only after speaking to a customer service agent of PMI to help with the scheduling issue.
Day 23 to 30 - I got an exam slot for 7th Dec and took it. I had borrowed PMP study guide (Kim Heldman 9th edition) from a friend and started going through chapters. The book is not well edited (in my opinion), and I found the language confusing at many places, making reading quite tedious. The end of chapter tests were quite useful. I had earlier noted that (during simulated test), my grasp of project planning and executing process areas were weak. So I read those chapters in the guide. For other sections, I only did the end of chapter test and reviewed the incorrect answers (25 hours).
Day 31 to 34 - I had purchased two sets of practice exams from Udemy.com, one set of Joseph Phillips (Set I - 200 questions) and other of Georgio Dacchache (300 questions) (both purchases were made purely based on user reviews). I attempted the exams and was scoring 68%-75% range in the first attempt. I reviewed all the incorrect answers.
Day 35 (day before exam) - I also accessed the online questions content of Kim Heldman guide from Wiley Online learning (Sybex), where additional 300 questions were available for review. I completed those 300 questions over one day.
Day 34 to 35 - Over the course of two days and morning hours on the exam day, I reviewed all the questions that I had attempted over the course of study and mock exams (PMP course - 400 + 350 end of chapter questions, Exam set I - 200 questions, Georgio Dacchache - 300 questions and Kim Heldman - 500 end of chapter questions and 170 exam questions). I noticed upon review that I tend to forget the answers for the non intuitive questions where knowledge of guide rather than experience is important, so I made sure I imbibe the project management concepts from the notes that I prepared from the online course. I actually never went back to the videos after the completion of the course but was relying on the notes I had prepared based on it.
I reached at the exam venue 45 minutes before the scheduled time (3PM). I wanted to briefly go through the notes and memory sheets (available from the course), but decided against it and promptly went to register for the test. I started my test at 2.45 PM.
The questions in the PMP exam were quite confusing in the choice of answers. The questions were all phrased much better than all of the mock exams I had attempted and was also closer to real work environment situations than the ones I had worked on. Kudos to PMI for preparing a well crafted question set. One could quite easily eliminate two of the answer choices, but the remaining choices both looked to be good answers for the question. This was the major issue that I faced in the exam. This was the case for majority of the confusing questions (which I had marked for review) that I encountered in the real exam.
My work experience also helped me visualize the scenarios of questions and I was thinking of my likely response as a project manager in handling such a situations. Hence, some of my answers were based on my work experience and certainly not based on PMBOK guide based principles. Please avoid this situation. I finished answering 200 questions in 2.35 hours (155 minutes) and reviewed all the answers in next 85 minutes. It was with quite a fearful mind that I clicked on the “Next” button after reviewing the 200th question, knowing that I will be seeing the result at the next page. Luckily for me, I passed. I scored “Above Target” in first three process areas, “On Target” in Monitoring & Controlling process area, and “Below Target” in the Closing process area. Somehow, the ‘Below Target’ score in one of the sections did not jeopardize my overall passing of the exam. I was quite lucky that day.
I had some years of experience writing and doing well in tough competitive exams in India, and that cumulative experience may have helped me clear PMP with minimal but very focused preparation.
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