Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is the
industry-recognized certification for project managers around the globe. Project
Management Institute (PMI) brings various project managers from around the
globe under one umbrella to follow standardized methodologies in various
projects. I was never a big fan of certifications ever since I started my
career but got motivated when I intially had some project mangement training in
my office. Initially started to browse through the concepts of Project
Management from Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) which is
considered as a bible for this exam.
This certification requires 35 contact hours regarding Project Management
concepts. Thats where most of the training institutions make a lot of business
by conducting boot camps and offering intensive training to crack the exam. I
was searching for such boot camps which were conducted in English in Germany.
There were quite a lot of instituions which offered PMP boot camps in English
in Germany. I settled for PMSTUDY mainly because of the number of PMPs they
produced, boot camps were conducted through out Germany and most importantly
their policy of Money Back Guarantee i.e 50% of the examination cost will be refunded when
one failed in the first exam and it continues till third attempt. PMP is a
costly affair where the examination fees costs up to 555$.
The boot camp gave me a chance to
interact with Project Managers from diversified field where I learnt that the management
concepts to be applied to various fields are pretty much the same with respect
to managing resources, time, cost etc to successfully carry out the project. PMP
exam mainly focuses on nine knowledge areas with respect to integration, scope,
time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, risk, procument management.
The exam also focuses on ethical concepts of managing the projects with respect
to various cultures. The inputs, the tools and techniques and the outputs of
various project management processes have to be memorized to the core but the
exam always ask application of those concepts in real-time scenarios. So just
mere memorizing can help to answer few questions but to crack the exam
definitely one needs to apply to the situations explained.
Around 20 to 25% of the questions doesn’t relate to any specific areas from
PMBOK but tests the general approach to problem solving in the real time
scenarios. The best way to get prepared for the exam is to have a general
reading of PMBOK (4th edition), then take lot of practise tests as much as one
can. The exam is for four hours so its better to take a sample test by sitting
dedicatedly for four hours to get used to the long streching examination
process. Rita Mulcahy (Preparing PMP exam 7th edition) gives detailed overview and
explanation of the concepts which gives thorough understanding of the various
tools and techniques which one uses in project management. Attending boot camp
is a nice idea when companies sponsor for it. Most of the companies I came
across sponsor for this boot camp.
At the end of the day, Project Management is all about soft skills and
managing and extracting the work from others. But but but Project Manager with
technical expertise are really the ones who are more successful in the longer
run. It was definitely a good learning curve preparing for this exam. I would
definitely suggest to take this exam who wants to be a Project Manager or the
ones who wants to learn various effective ways to manage the project.
Please get back to me if you have any questions or doubts of how to crack this
exam, I will try my level best to guide you to this process since its also
utmost duty of PMIs to spread the knowledge acquired J I am so glad that I wanted to finish this
certification before my 30th birthday and it happened. Thanks to my family who
constantly supported me in various stages of this certification.
Cheers,
Sathish Kumar PMP J
Related Links:
www.pmstudy.com
www.pmi.org
