I passed the PMP exam on 22 June in Luxembourg. Acknowledging that the exam experience, the preparation strategies, etc. can very different for every person, here are my lessons learnt.

Motivation:

Certification was not required but generously supported by my employer and I decided to go for it as a career development opportunity. My background is in translation management and procurement, and I figured that with the certification I can venture into other areas closer to the core activities of the company involving project management.

Application:

Took me a few days to make sure I gave a good description of all my past projects, to calculate the hours, find and contact old colleagues for reference, ask for their support, etc. Do not underestimate the effort you need to put into the application process to make a good impression. In the end I was not audited, not that it would have mattered, I was prepared.

Training:

4 days basic training plus 2 days test support provided by the local office of an international consulting firm, organised by my employer for a group of project managers at the company. I was the first in the group to get the certification.

Preparation:

I think the effort one needs to put into the preparation largely depends on the complexity of projects one has experience with, and how well those projects followed the PMI methodology. My effort was in the range of 100 hours from February through June, i.e. 1-2 hours of studying after work, 3-4 hours stolen from the family on some weekends, plus one full week off work before the exam.

Study material:

- PMBOK Guide: read it once, then used it for reference, it was sooooo dry for my taste I was drinking constantly… ;-) Plus I read through the definitions at the end of the book once again just before the exam, which proved to be a good idea.

- HeadFirst PMP: exactly what I needed. Clear, graphic, funny. Covers 99% of what you need to pass, makes the whole thing look “easy”. Also, of all the mock tests I did, the tests in the book were probably the closest to the real exam questions.

- Rita Mulcahy’s Exam Prep Audio: I listened to the audio files during my daily commuting from Germany to Luxembourg for like 2 weeks before the exam. Good for hammering some hard-to-learn concepts, definitions, terms into your head.

- Some randomly found IOS apps for the iPad, mostly low quality, I don’t even remember them by name. Not really worth more than what they cost, a few bucks each, but were handy on long train/plain travels, e.g. to memorise definitions.

Mock exams:

With the exam scheduled on a Friday, I took the full week off to do nothing else but exam simulations. By then I have read PMBOK and HeadFirst and was scoring around 80% on a number of free exams downloaded from various sources (also the ones collected by PMzilla, thanks for that) plus the ones in HeadFirst.

The exam CD provided by our trainers (PMP Certification Exam Simulator by BRIGHTPUBLISHING, avoid that!) proved to be unusable, some of the questions must have come from Mars, they just made no sense. I then started looking for online question banks, and I ended up buying a decent package at www.pmperfect.com. Quality was OK: the questions turned out to be quite different in structure and style from the real ones, but all the areas were neatly covered. And they were good in pointing out my weak areas. The exam methodology (timed progress, marking, etc.) was however the same and it was good for training myself on exam stress and timing strategy. I managed to improve my average score to 85%. I must have done at least five full 4-hour simulations during that week, but it is also possible to do smaller lots of say 50 questions, also timed.

The exam:

Despite all the week-long training, the exam itself proved to be hard and exhausting. It was one of the most challenging experiences in my life; I left the room trembling…

The exam was in downtown Luxembourg in a small apartment converted into e-training facility. As advised, I arrived well before the scheduled time, like an hour or so. The corridor was empty, the door closed and I got quite nervous while waiting for the test attendant to arrive. He arrived just 10 minutes before the scheduled time (by rule he should have checked me in 30 minutes before the exam), by which time I felt quite pissed off. I am a nervous type and this didn’t help at all…

After the 15 minutes introduction, which I used to empty my memory and jot down the formulas, etc., the questions started coming and for some time I felt OK. My practiced strategy was to mark for review all the questions that were either too complex to work out in less than a minute (formulas) plus the ones I was not 100% sure of. As expected, by around 100-120 questions I got really tired and was much less efficient than in the beginning, I had to read the questions several times, so I took a short break. In the end I could finish all 200 with 50 minutes remaining. But then I started reviewing the marked ones only to realise that I marked too many (around 60?) and I slowly began to panic as the clock was counting down and the list was still too long… In the end, my time ran up and I still had a handful of marked questions.

The problem with these types of tests is that you have absolutely no feedback as you progress and you do not know how you are doing until after the test. Those five minutes waiting for the results were killing and the stress was immense, but then the relief in the end was even greater. I scored proficient (above average) in two and moderately proficient (average) in the other three areas.

Exam questions:

Of course, the majority of questions focused on the inputs, tools & techniques and outputs (ITTOs), most of the time in the format of: what should have been done to avoid such and such problems with the project. Or: where can the project manager turn to for reference? So, there seems to be no escape from learning the ITTOs of all the 42 processes, I am afraid.

There must have been around 10-15 formula-related questions, mostly on earned value, and sometimes quite complicated (several minutes to do, at least for me). A lot of interpretative questions, e.g. calculate the SPI and then is the project on or behind schedule, etc. Don’t remember TCPI, but certainly EAC and ETC, EMV for risks, communication channels, etc. A surprising number of PDM and critical path questions as well.

I cannot remember a single question on professional and social responsibility, this topic must have been taken out or very cleverly hidden. There were only 2-3 questions where I had absolutely no clue, and some sounded plain silly – these could have been the odd statistical ones that did not count. All in all, the questions were more or less in line with what I could expect after doing so many mock tests over the week.

Final word:

- prepare well J

- do not underestimate the timing and stress factor during the exam

- have an exam strategy (which questions will you mark?), do as many simulations as you can to test your strategy

- to make sure you can answer all 200 questions in time, you need to answer at least half of the questions without thinking much, so there are a lot of definitions, terms, concepts, you actually need to know by heart…

Good luck everyone!