My company starting to put more emphasis in project management. They try to avoid having the employees to work insane overtime, having forever slipping the project schedule and most important of all, minimize the risk of the project. They even start a new project management career leader in addition to the normal technical and management career leader. Project Management Professional (PMP) is the credential for project managers, it’s very common in construction, utilities and software industries. It is relatively new to semi-conductor industry and it is slowly getting acceptance. It would be an asset for me to have the PMP credential.
The PMP exam has 200 MC question and it is 4 hours long. There are expensive preparation course out there to help you pass the exam. In my opinion those prep course are a waste of money, unless they are paid by my company. I am expert of writing open exams. I have aced in TOEFL, SAT, GRE, GMAT, P.Eng exam The PMP exam is not that difficult compare to other open exams. Probably about the same level as the P.Eng practice exams on legal and ethics. The official PMP textbook is really boring and the content very confusing. Reading it is a waste of time because you won’t remember a thing. There are lots of prep books out there. I am using the one written by Andy Crowe, but I think any the prep books can get the job done. Studying the prep books won’t teach you much about project management, but it can help you pass the exam.
I applied the PMP exam last year and I have been procrastinating to schedule my exam date. My application is about to expire, so I finally schedule my exam on the last available date. It gives me only one month to prepare for my exam. There are 10 knowledge area in PMP exam. I have to study 3 chapters per week. It took me 2-3 hours to study one chapter. The work load is not too bad, I only have to study a few hours every other day. The prep book comes with a mock exam and a 1 week trial for an online exam database. I will save the mock exam and the exam database access until the last week. I think my study schedule is pretty good. I don’t want to span my study over a long period of time, since I may forget what I learned a few months ago. A one month study plan is just about right.
if you approach this the same way you took on GMAT, i’m sure you’d do just fine. this is definitely one of those cases where you are purely studying for the exam. i don’t think the study material actually teaches you anything you don’t already know.
It’s mostly common sense in presented in a special set of language and terms.
Interesting comment re the PMP. Do you take the PMP test at a test centre on a computer where you get your score right away? And do the test questions get harder (or easier) as you get the question right (or wrong)?
It’s a computer exam. I think they are not that complicate. It just randomly pick questions from the data bank. I only have to get 61% right to pass.