pmp tips

Congratulations on Passing the PMP Exam Kevin!

by Josh

Posted on behalf of Kevin in Michigan, who passed his PMP exam recently (based on the 4th edition of the PMBOK Guide)

Happy - by B Rosen via Flickr (this isn't Kevin in the photo! :-)

Happy - by B Rosen via Flickr (this isn't Kevin in the photo! :-)

Josh:  Congratulations on passing your PMP exam Kevin!  Any tips for others who are preparing for it?

General

  • I memorized 40+ formulas for my brain dump sheet.  One key to success for me was to “logically” understand all of the ITTO.
  • Having a solid understanding of the knowledge areas is beneficial.
  • I had to know the best answer from the available list of answers. So for listed principles found in the PMBOK, I had to know each principle in the list and then which ones were better than each other.

Study Tips

Three essential preparation techniques for me (in addition to the helpful emails from Josh Nankivel) included attending a TrainingCamp class for PMP that was well-instructed by Douglas Boebinger, listening to the PM Prepcast by Cornelius Fichtner, and taking several practice exams with scenario based questions. When it comes to practice exams, scenario based questions required me to understand what the question was asking and then apply PMP principles. I had a lot of scenario based questions on my exam. Prepare using scenario based questions will help aspirants to learn how to determine what the exam question is really asking, then learn how to extract the important details while ignoring non-essential information, and then learn to apply their PMP knowledge. Also, a word of caution when it comes to sample exams: stay away from practice exams that are not PMBOK 4th edition complaint. I ran into some earlier version exam questions that would just confused me because some of the processes are completely different or in different order. To weed those out later, I specifically Googled for “PMP 4th edition exam questions”.

Below are two really good links for practice exams designed for the 4th edition of the PMBOK (they provide good explanations for understanding each question):

http://www.headfirstlabs.com/PMP/free_exam/

http://www.oliverlehmann.com/

Also, I encourage aspirants who are familiar with computer testing to use the tutorial time for creating the brain dump sheet; that will save at least 15 minutes of exam time.

Hope that helps!

Kevin

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