How I passed the PMP
I’ve received some questions about advice for passing this exam. Below is an email I sent to someone detailing my experience + an aggregate of what I found on r/PMP and elsewhere over time. Felt like it would be easier to put this into a post for me to reference back to and share with others.
So I struggled when I took it last year. I felt pretty disheartened since I studied a lot harder last time than I did this time when I passed. I studied for 2-3 months. This time, I crammed about 70-80 hours in a week. It almost kind of felt fluky that I passed, but whatever I am so happy to be done.
In terms of what I recommend for studying and resources:
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First and foremost, I got put on the VoIP project at UAB. That was the single most important thing that helped me in passing. It gave me so much context. Everything I studied I was able to relate to my current work. The last time I took it, I was working on a much smaller project and the material made sense, but I didn’t have anywhere near the same amount of experience. Being in project manager mentality took me 2 years, and I now understand why they say to have 3 years of experience before taking the exam. The questions made a lot more sense to me and I knew better what the questions were looking for in each situation, and where I was in the project. Though it’s definitely possible to pass without the PM experience, it helps significantly to have that be the only function I was doing on a project.
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I highly recommend 2-3 months of studying 2-4 hours a day. Spend a week on each section of the exam, take a practice test at the end of each month, go back and study the areas you aren’t strong in (mine was planning + executing), then take another practice exam. Keep doing that until you’re in the 90% passing rate on practice tests. This is a beast of an exam at 200 questions and 4 hours, it deserves that much attention.
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Make sure you focus your attention on the following areas, as there were a lot of questions about these: Risk, Quality, Stakeholder, and Integration (most centrally important area, but the others will have more questions). Scope and schedule are the next two ones I’d focus on. Cost + Resource after that. Then Communications, then Procurement last. PMs aren’t very involved in procurement so I kind of glossed over that.
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Resources I recommend (in order of what I think worked best for me):
1) PM Prepcast videos + simulator ($300) – pay for it. I definitely believe this significantly helped me pass. The training videos are so great in their detail and explanations. This comes with podcast downloads + videos, so also helpful there to study on the go.
2) PM Training – lots of great practice questions for a reasonable price (think it was $70).
3) Edward Designer – I used his summarized notes for each section after watching videos on PM Prepcast. (all free)
4) Joseph Phillips’s class on Udemy – it’s $11. Really good value for really great content. This plus his exam cram videos are another video resource I recommend. Though I preferred PM Prepcast because of the detail (like 80 hours of videos), Joseph’s videos are more condensed (25 hours of videos).
5) Rita book – this plus + Andy Crowe are the two books everyone recommends. Comes with flash cards + podcasts.
6) Andy Crowe book
7) PMBOK – I don’t recommend reading this, but to have as a point of reference when you’re watching or reading the above.
I think that’s a lot, and I’m sure I missed something. Let me know if you have any other questions, though. I’d be happy to help in whatever way I can.