A lot of people who are interested in getting a PMP credential simply don’t know where to start, and I’ve realized that there’s no single place that tells you everything you need to know about getting your PMP credential.

So, this is my attempt to create a comprehensive guide on how to go about getting your PMP starting from seeing if you’re eligible and ending with preparing for the PMP exam.

Determine your PMP eligibility

PMI has strict guidelines on who is eligible for a PMP, and your first step is to determine if you qualify for the credential, and have the necessary experience and education to get a PMP.

PMP Prerequisites in Brief:

• Secondary degree (high school diploma, associate’s degree or the global equivalent)
• Minimum five years/60 months unique non overlapping professional project management experience during which at least 7,500 hours were spent leading and directing the projects
• 35 hours of project management education

OR

• Four-year degree
• Minimum three years/36 months unique non-overlapping professional project management experience during which at least 4,500 hours were spent leading and directing the project
• 35 hours of project management education

You can find more details in the PMP handbook, but the above is a quick and good check to see if you qualify or not.

How do I get project management education?

You need 35 PDUs (Personal Development Units) in order to be eligible to take the test, and there are several ways to do it.

I went to Simplilearn and did one of their courses that makes you eligible for the 35 PDUs. I quite liked this option because it was fully online, so I could pace it the way I wanted, and the material was quite good as well.

In fact, I used some of the material till the very end in my exam preparation, and it turned out to be quite handy. It costs about a $100, and I think it is well worth the money.

How to fill the PMP Application Form?

Filling the PMP application form requires about 8 to 10 hours, and needs to be done carefully, so that you ensure that all details are accurate. You are required to give project details that qualify you for the PMP, and you may have done some of these projects a few years ago which makes it important to go through the application carefully, and make sure you haven’t made any mistake.

The form consists of biographical information, which is the easy part, and project information, which is the time consuming part.

You have to describe each project you worked in that qualifies you for project experience, and you have to give the following details:

• Project Name
• Job Title
• Organization Name
• Contact Name
• Contact Relationship
• Contact Email and Phone Number
• Number of hours spent in each of these areas:
  • Initiating the project
  • Planning the project
  • Executing the project
  • Controlling and Monitoring the Project
  • Closing the project
• 80 to 100 word description of the project and your role

I recommend that you reach out to your contact, and inform them of your PMP application and even share it with them because PMI randomly audits certain applications, and if they call up your contact with whom you worked several years ago, and they aren’t able to recall what you did – your application may get rejected.

Dividing your time spent into the five project areas can be a tedious task, and I created a spreadsheet that helped me do that. You can take a look at it, and see if it can assist you in filling out your PMP application form.

There is a two to three week wait period after you submit your application in which PMI evaluates your candidature, and you will get an email after your application has been approved.

You have one year from this day to take the test.

Become a PMI Member

It is not mandatory to become a PMI member in order to take the test, but it is beneficial to get membership because you get a discount on the test, which is more than the membership fee, and you get to download the latest version of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) free of cost.

These two benefits make it a no brainer to become a PMP member, but I must admit that I wasn’t aware of this at the time, and took the test without membership.

How do I prepare for the PMP exam?

I believe the PMP exam is nothing to scoff at and it takes at least six months of serious preparation to get in a position to clear it.

The exam consists of 200 questions, out of which 175 are evaluated, and 25 are pretest which don’t get graded but are being evaluated for future use by PMI. The exam lasts for four hours, and almost everyone ends up using the four hours.

This is one of those exams where you don’t know what the passing grade is because PMI doesn’t reveal it. I found that I scored around 80% in the practice tests I took right before the exam, and that was good enough to pass.

Getting to 80% was an uphill battle, and I only reached there with persistence and discipline. In the beginning I was getting just over 60% so if that is what you get in the beginning don’t get disheartened, and just keep at it.

I will outline how I recommend preparing for the PMP exam based on the advice I got, the things I did, and the mistakes I made, and you can take this as a baseline to tailor your own preparation.

Step 1: Understand how the PMBOK is structured: I think it is very useful to prime yourself to the way the PMBOK is structured in order to make the most of your effort to study for the exam.

You need to be extremely familiar with the matrix shown below, and a lot of people even memorize this matrix (I did as well) before taking the exam. The PMBOK has 5 phases, ten knowledge areas, and 47 processes.

Each process falls in an intersection of a phase and a knowledge area, and it is important to know where it falls as well as the sequence of processes within a phase and knowledge area. The exam has questions on which process should be done first, and which process should follow another process, and therefore it is important to know the sequence.

Each process has inputs, tools that you use to execute the process, and the outputs of that process. Ideally, you should memorize these as well, but I found it very difficult to memorize such a great deal of information, and stopped at memorizing the 47 processes.

Image Source: Simplilearn

Step 2: Read Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Exam Prep:  The first thing I did is read Rita Mulcahy’s PMP exam prep book, and I think this is a good way to start.

This book gives you a good theoretical foundation of the topics covered in the exam, and it’s an easy read. The questions at the end of every chapter allow you to test your understanding on what you have read, and this is a far more readable book than the PMBOK.

Step 3: Learn all the numerical questions: I see the numerical questions as a relatively easy opportunity to score. This is all 8^th Standard Maths, and if you can get comfortable with a few formulas, you can get to a level where you can get all numerical questions correct in the exam.

With that in mind, I practiced the numerical questions first from Rita Mulcahy, got a good understanding of the concepts, memorized the formulas, and practiced them with each test I subsequently took.

This really helped me in the exam, and I am fairly certain that except for one numerical question, I got everything else correct. That was a question on scheduling, and I spent an undue amount of time trying to get it right, and eventually gave it up because it was taking too much time.

I have written a post on all the formulas you need to learn for the PMP exam, and you can go through this post, and learn them yourself, and apply them in questions that you encounter subsequently.

Step 4: Practice Tests: There are a large number of practice tests online, and this is the best link to go through them, and practice your understanding.

An interesting bit of advice that I got was to read the last line of the question first, and then read the rest of the question. The PMP questions are quite wordy with a lot of redundant information, and reading the last line first quite often primes you to look for the pertinent information in the question, and saves you from getting lost in their wordiness.

This takes more time than if you were to just read the whole question first, but the extra time is justified because of the increased accuracy it gives you.

Step 5: Review your incorrect answers: Reviewing your incorrect answers is a little bit of an art in the PMP exam because your answer can be incorrect for one of the following reasons:

• You didn’t understand the concept
• The supposed right answer in the practice test is in fact wrong
• The supposed right answer in the practice test was right at a certain time, but the latest edition of the PMBOK has rendered it incorrect.

In my opinion the most practical and efficient way of reviewing your answers is to find the concept in the PMBOK, read through the paragraphs concerning it, and then see if the right answer now makes sense to you.

This will develop a deeper understanding of the concept, and also help highlight questions where you might in fact be right, and the practice question may be wrong. In some cases, it will also make sense to go through the relevant sections in Rita Mulcahy because the PMBOK may be a little thin on it, and you need additional help to understand what the concept really means.

Step 6: Practice writing process list and formulas in ten minutes: Just before the exam you get about 10 minutes to review instructions on how to take the exam, and this is not going to take ten minutes for most people.

Use this time to write the 47 processes and important formulas as a quick reference during the exam. I started doing this quite late in the game because it didn’t seem realistic to me to be able to memorize 47 processes in a sequence, but in the end I was able to do it quite easily, and I have written a post on how to memorize all 47 PMP processes that you may find useful.

Doing this helped my time and accuracy quite a lot so I highly recommend it.

Step 7: Plan, Do, Check, Act: I made a lot of adjustment to my preparation based on how I was doing, the weaknesses I saw, and what I thought was best to overcome them, and most people will encounter the same thing. Try out what works best for you, and make adjustments to your plan accordingly.

Conclusion

Getting your PMP credential takes discipline and dedication, and it is by no means an easy thing to achieve. If it were easy, it wouldn’t carry the weight it carries, so go in with a mindset that you will need to work hard for it, but the rewards will be well worth it.

Apart from the professional benefits, a significant benefit I reaped after doing my PMP was to gain in confidence and set goals that would take more than a year or so of disciplined work to achieve.

For instance, I always wanted to read the Mahabharata but was awed by its size. Passing the PMP gave me the confidence that I can finish reading this monster book, and set a target to read it within 2016, and I am currently on target to complete it. I have also been writing synopsis of a lot of stories within the book, and that’s something extra that I didn’t initially plan to do.

If you qualify for PMP then the effort is certainly worth the reward, and I recommend you take the exam, and wish you well in it.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions, or see any inaccuracies in my post, and I will address your feedback.

I wrote about preparing for my CSM a few days ago, and I cleared the test quite easily a few days ago. I linked to an excellent post on preparing for CSM that contained mock tests, and other study material, but what I found was just going through the 16 page guide, and paying attention in the class is quite enough for this test.

I got 34 out of 35 questions correct which is quite decent, and if you’re preparing for this test, I’d recommend taking it as close to the training as possible, and going through the guide once before you take it.

I have wanted to do the CSM certification for a while now, and I’m finally getting the opportunity to take the training this weekend.

I am excited to go to the training, and I’m looking forward to clear the exam soon after so that I can clear it while it is still fresh in my mind.

To that effect, I thought I’d do a quick post on how I plan to prepare for this test, and so far everyone has told me this is a relatively simple test, and thirty five questions with a 70% passing mark doesn’t seem like all that big a challenge.

I found an extremely good post about preparing for the CSM certification, and I’m going to follow the steps in his post, and do a follow up on this post next week to say how I did in the test.

I really liked this article from HBR for its common sense advice, and the research also pointed me in the direction of something I had not thought about previously, i.e. thinking about ways in which the recipient can help fix the problem.

An excerpt:

In short, we found that pairing the problem immediately with a potential solution dramatically improves creativity and problem solving, but only if it’s the right kind of solution. In this study, 248 participants were first tested on a standard measure of problem solving. For example, one question asked them to list as many uses for a ribbon as they could think of in a specific period of time. Then the participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: in one they were asked to read an article merely focused on a problem, while the other discussed the problem and potential solutions. As an example, one pair of articles looked at shortages at a local food bank. The solution-focused article featured five things you could do to alleviate the problem, including donating food and fundraising. The participants were then given a new battery of problem-solving tasks.

The participants who were presented with solutions carried that positive effect to the new domain — it had a significant impact on participants’ creativity and problem solving ability. Specifically, when people were presented with solutionsthey could actually implement themselves, problem-solving on subsequent unrelated tasks increased by 20%. Reminding the brain that there is a path forward allows you to import that empowered mindset to other challenges. Additionally, being solution-focused made people feel better. Participants reported on average feeling 19% less agitated and 23% less uptight. For a manager leading employees through hard times, this means it is possible to talk about the negatives (such as scarcity of resources) and yet maintain engagement and the ability to solve problems.