Hello PMP Aspirants!
Here is a glimpse of how I went from BT/BT/NI/NI/BT to AT/AT/AT/T/AT. Yep, it took me two attempts to pass this exam!
What went wrong the first time around? Quite a bit, to be honest.
- The first reason was that I booked my exam date too far in advance with almost no preparation. I booked it almost 7 months in advance hoping that if I set a target date, I would be motivated to study. As you probably would have guessed by now, that's not what happened. I felt I had time enough to prepare. But, with my full-time job, it was quite difficult to stick to a schedule. I ended up procrastinating and had too many lessons to go through before the big day. I also had to skim through the final lessons of procurement, communication, and stakeholder knowledge areas.
- I took no full-length practice tests. On the day of the exam, 270 minutes seemed impossible for me to focus and give it my best shot. I found myself getting distracted, not thinking clearly.
- Applying real-life Project Management experience to answer questions on the exam. When you start going through a few practice tests, you'd find yourself choosing answers based on your real-life experience as a PM. It could very well be how your company's policy is structured to plan and manage projects. However, when it comes to the exam, it is important to know that the concepts are purely based on PMBOK. Though you may not strictly follow the PMBOK in your regular job, it is important to understand the subtle differences and pick the right answer.
- I only used the 'Head First PMP' book as a study material. I had not even heard of PM Prepacast until I ventured on Reddit and saw a lot of posts mentioning it. I wish I had done more research and chosen the right materials. There's nothing wrong with the Head first book necessarily. however, I felt that it did not do a good job of explaining how processes work with each other as a whole, emphasize the I/TT/O, explain differences between processes that seemed similar, etc.
What did I do differently the second time around? A year later....
- I purchased the PM PrepCast course material and the simulator. I went through all the knowledge area videos and paid attention to examples, how inputs, outputs from one process translate to the others. How different areas work together. This was a solid exercise to nail the fundamentals in your head. The pace of the videos was a little slow for me, but I installed a widget that let me change the playback speed up to 2x.
- I created a study plan on my Google Calendar and divided the lessons and self-assessments across each day, I also made sure I had rest days in between. The whole process took me about 4 months with a full-time job. Staying at home during the pandemic helped me focus to stay on track with my schedule with minimal distractions.
- I took all 7 exams in the simulator, my favorite is the summary statistics window which helped me understand the areas I had to focus on. My scores ranged from 73-82% (first attempt). I took extra quizzes focussed on areas that were ranked the least based on my test scores. Counting up to the days to my exam I took an exam every other day and focussed on reviewing my incorrect responses in between the exams.
- I booked my date when I truly felt ready, I did it after my 4th full-length simulator exam. It was 10 days from when I booked it and I chose to take the online version through Pearson VUE.
- I also reviewed the PMI PMP exam outline to understand the exam content a bit better. This was really helpful for the exam.
www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public...nal-exam-outline.pdf
Day of my exam-
I took it at 10 in the morning.
PRO TIP - Try booking the exam slot at the same time you typically take your simulator mock exams. The first 90 questions went okay, some of them were slightly tricky. But the 2nd half of the exam was a cruise. I completed the exam 29 minutes early and really had no brain cells left to review my answers. Once I hit submit, I was SO HAPPY to see the 'Congratulations' screen! I did it!
I received my certificate and the exam report the next day!
Hope some of you find these lessons learned helpful! Good luck with your exam!
