Student Profile: Sophie Kenny, PMP
I've been a project manager for the past 5 years, although my roots are in telecom. I was a telecom adminstrator back in the 80s and 90s for a large canadian life insurance company. In 1994 i changed companies to the pension sector, initially in a telecom role and shortly after due to restructuring, telecom was moved to our service desk area and I stayed on in IT taking on infrastructure projects.
I've known for many years that the PMP designation was very well thought of in the industry, but what spurred me on was the hiring on one more project manager in my department. The pmi designation was highly favorable to his being chosen, and this really drove the point home for me.
The most difficult part for me was memorizing the formulas. I wrote them all out, made sure I knew the acronyms and bought myself a small dry erase board. In the last 2 weeks before my exam, I would write out the formulas on the dry erase board every night to make sure that I practiced my brain dump. Another challenge were the ITTOS. I read everyone's advice online about making sure that you understood the processes and that memorization is not necessary. For me, understanding the processes was one part of it, but I also made myself a list of the most significant inputs and outputs and what process group they belonged to. I practiced writing this on my whiteboard every night as well.
I did an online search and looked through many websites. I liked the PM Prepcast in that it was portable, I listened to it every day on the commuter train and I even took it with me to our Christmas vacation on the beach in Mexico!
It's hard for me to find anything missing from the PrepCast as I found everything that I needed in the PrepCast. In comparisson to other products out there, for instance with the exam simulator, I could trust the PrepCast simulator, whereas some other exam simulators I tried raised significant questions in my mind about the quality of the questions and their accuracy. I also liked the structure of repeating overview at the beginning of each lesson, which was a vlaualbe tool to reinforce the concepts learned.
My #1 recommendation for those studying for the examMake sure to give yourself plenty of time to study, and structure your study time. This is not an exam where you can just read the pmbok and go write the exam. You will need to structure your time to cover a high level review, then drill down to more specific areas that you need to focus on for yourself, include the time to make study notes, and index card and the time to use the simulator, practice the brain dump so that you know what you will do in the first 15 minutes. All these techniques taken together as a package should ensure success on the exam.