Congratulations! I like the idea of no studying at the weekends

Hei all, here are my lessons learned

I'm an engineer working as a PM for 10 years now and i do have additional education in project management direction, including MBA in strategic project management, so basically, i fulfilled all initial requirements for scheduling the exam.

I started my journey to PMP in January this year, by reading PMBOK Guide from A to Z. Even though i thought i had a solid background already, the amount of detailed information in PMBOK Guide and my lack of thorough understanding of details in processes and their interdependencies made me think of re-planning my journey a bit.

I decided to take it easy, as the only time constraint i had was eglibility for the exam, so in theory i had 12 months or so. In practice less as of beginning of 2021 exam will change. Anyway, i still took it easy and i didn't want to stress myself to clear the exam in 2-3 months. I wanted to take an advantage of the learning process and do a quality job with my preparations.

I did not plan my learning in details, but instead i said that i need to spent at least 15h per working week studying and progress according to my capacity. Rule no2, no studying during weekends . This way i dismantled PMBOK Guide into pieces in couple of weeks. and that time i think i got a good overall overview of process groups, but i couldn't yet remember details. I've done some free mock exams, but i did not perform very good in situational questions involving ITTO and those asking for details regarding using T&T. I was a bit confused.

I was looking for advices and I got one from colleague of mine. She passed PMP exam couple of weeks earlier and she recommended me Rita's book. So i bought it, i went through together with referencing PMBOK Guide with same pattern as before. max 15h of studying/working week, no studying in weekends. I did all tests in Rita's book and i was somewhere between 60% - 70% and i was still lacking confidence. I tried to read couple of other books, but their structure and difficulty level made me stop reading...i was a bit confused and i needed something good and comprehensive, same time relatively easy to absorb.

This was the time when i came across PM prepcast forum (around March 2020 i believe). I bought access to videos and Exam simulator. This step was a breakthrough for me. When i tried couple of quizzes i scored quite low, which made me a bit confused as i scored much lower then in other mock tests, but i thought OK, as for training, the harder the better, but same time i understood that there is no point of doing much more of the tests as im scoring low and i didn't want to remember questions to have a good tool for measuring my preparedness for the real exam, so i placed on hold excercises with Exam simulator.

So next natural move for me was to go through all videos of the PMprepcast...yeah, and that was a piece of journey. Many thanks to PrepCast team for that trip . I do not know what was the phenomena, but the way it is build, integration with PMBOK Guide, a bit of humour, plenty of practical tips etc..etc.. it suited me 100%. I reviewed all videos, i made a lot of notes (over 500 pages in word) i read PMBOK Guide along and it simply worked. couple of weeks ago i went back to Exam simulator and the lowest score i got in full exams was 82% (ITTO) all others above. BTW, for entire PMprepcast journey i still used same principle - max.15h/week and no studying over weekends

What was most strange for me during learning was that everyone was saying not to memorize ITTO's, just understand the flow. For the long time i didn't believe that, even though i respected the opinions of more experienced colleagues. What happened with me was that i followed this advice even though i did not believed it. Through those couple of months i was trying to find a logic in processes, logic in how T&T are applied and why, what document is coming in and what the process is to produce etc...etc... And guess what, without putting much dedicated energy into it, i memorized most ITTO's without noticing it. I found this out when i was reviewing PMBOK guide appendixes. Especially one for tools and techniques. When i covered right side of the matrix to guess, where given tool or technique belongs, i just knew most of them, with few exceptions.

To my opinion PMprepcast is one of the best (or even the best, hard to say as i do not know all) and absolutely a game-changer. It is a great Guide to PMBOK Guide (yes, guide for guide )
But same time i think there are no shortcuts and I believe in hard work. PMPrepcast will not do a job for you, you still need to do the job yourself. Be honest with yourself, study hard and you will pass.

Regarding exam itself....

Day before exam (yesterday) i did some sporadic reading and played a bit with learning quizzes, as i had to travel few hours to testing center i spent night at the hotel, i ordered my favorite Chinese food, played some games what relaxes me and went to bed early.

So, today i went to sit for the exam with OK confidence, well rested and quite happy that i did good job preparing myself. I understood the majority of the content of the questions, there were enough information for me to see the answer i thought was right. After all i thought it was not actually that hard as i assumed it would be.

Sure, i still have some gaps, but i'll close them on the way now. I'm also quite excited about coming changes, i plan to do some more learning on Agile part and looking forward to PMBOK Guide 7th edition

Take care of yourselves and good luck!