Thanks to everyone on these boards, especially the MODs. It's been a very helpful community.
I passed this week with 5 AT's studying for 3 months and here are some brief lessons learned.
Materials Used
1. PMBOK - Read through the whole thing. At the end of each chapter I went back and made notes (1st Month)
2. Headfirst PMP - It was okay, a light read, got for some areas PMBOK didn't explain well, but in hindsight should have tried another book (2 weeks)
3. PMP Exam Prep seminar (Joseph Philips - UDEMY) - Helpful, explains PMBOK material in a easy to digest way going into details of what you might need (1 Week)
4. PREPCAST EXAMS - Very helpful in terms of seeing where you with grasping the knowledge. Explanations great way of learning as well (Month and a half)
5. PMI Mock Exam - Very helpful, I'll explain why down below, wrote it 4-5 times as practice (Final two weeks)
My strategy was to only read the PMBOK once, and use my notes for review after that on each process. I read through each process atleast 7 times from my notes there after during the past 3 months adding additional notes and learnings from Headfirst, Joseph Philips seminar and Prepcast exams as I went. I also made an emphasis to learn 2 key outputs from each process and the details of what they contained and did. Read extra on Initiation and Closing Process groups to understand documents and processes of them as they contain only 3 processes but make up for a decent amount of exam. I did the Prepcast questions for the last month and half along with my studying, doing maybe 30-60 questions at a time rather than the full exam just to gauge where I was at. I reviewed no only incorrect answers, but I wrote down questions I was unsure about and reviewed them even if I got them right.
My main learning which may or may not help you
The PMI exam is about your knowledge of the material (and that's done through studying) but the part I found most challenging was understanding their questions to apply the knowledge. At one point I felt like I understood the knowledge really well and could teach it to people from memory. But then I wrote the PMI mock exam, as many have said did horribly and was a huge shot to my confidence. At that point I was scoring 80% plus on pretty much all my Prepcast quizzes. I found the Prepcast quizzes great for testing knowledge, but the PMI exam is much more ambiguous. I could read Prepcast questions and after a while by the end of it without looking at the options know which should be the right answer and it was usually an option given. I can't do that for PMI exam questions, or what I think should be the answer is never given.
What I learned to do was to use Prepcast to learn and gauge my knowledge and understanding of the material, and it was great for that. What I did with the PMI exam was I used it as practice (like training muscle memory) to read and understand their questions. To be able to read their question, understand the root issue and not spending time just to interpret it, and then reading the types of answers they give you to choose from and practice eliminating them until you have 1 or 2 options left. And even though you know the answer after writing it a few times, just going through the practice, why does this option not work, why does this option not work.
Last tidbit, think of the PMI questions not as how would you fix the problem, but what does a Project Manager do. PM's don't overreact, they engage the team and stakeholders, they document, they look for impact on the project, they problem solve, they follow the procedure in place, they involve people.
