Student Profile: Guillaume Babbi, PMP

I come from France, and it's been two years now that my wife and I are living in New York City. I am an IT project manager, in a french bank. I used to manage IT project for 5 years (I started in Paris), and last summer my manager encouraged be to get this PMP certification.

After my boss told me about PMP, I did some research on the Internet and found that it was indeed a world-wide certification. I think what convinced me the most was to be able to have a well recognized certification in addition to a strong framework to base my daily tasks on.

What was the most difficult part of my studies? Getting started! There is a lot of paperwork to do before being able to apply to the PMP exam. In my case, I had to dive into my last years of experience to pull out information about all the projects I worked on. The PMI process is quite heavy as well, so I do recommend to have all of this done before starting the study part.

I actually needed the 35h certification, and this is how I heard about PM Prepcast. I found a few articles and blogs speaking about PMP certification, and some of them were describing how to get there. PM Prepcast was always referred a serious tool to start studies. Plus, the price is one of the lowest you can find for a self-learning method like that.

Nothing much is missing from the PM PrepCast. It's really well done and have all the information you need. What I would suggest is to have a chapter giving the "big picture" of the PMBOK. It actually took me some time to understand how it was organized (processes, main areas, activities dependencies, etc.), a 10-15 min explanation would have been great to help me before jumping into that - heavy and dry - PMBOK.

My #1 recommandation is: practice, practice, practice! I bought the PM Exam Simulator too, and this worked just great. The questions are very similar to the real exam's. You guys did a great job.