Finally I made PMP on the last day before the new format .
It was a really difficult journey for me because I had rescheduled my exam couple of times earlier due to lack of preparation and personal constraints. My road to PMP has been quite tough as I started my journey in May 2009 with PMBOK® Guide 4 and flunked exam in 2011 which was very disheartening. I again started my preparation with Rita Mulachy and PMBOK® Guide 4 and when my prepration was in full swing I scheduled for the exam in 2012 but to my horror my application was randomly selected for audit. I successfully completed the audit process but couldn't schedule the exam due to escalations at work place and meanwhile PMBOK® Guide 5 was introduced.
I switched to PMBOK® Guide 5 and added PM PrepCast and Exam simulator to my arsenal and spend 1 hour daily going through the podcast by Cornelius Fichtner along with reading corresponding chapters in Rita Mulachy and PMBOK 5. I developed confidence but still was not able to score above 65% in the sample exams. I scheduled the exam in May 2013 as I was reasonably confident but again flunked the exam by narrow margin as I scored Below Proficient in Planning but Proficient and Moderate Proficient in others areas.
I had no clue how PMI determined passing score even though sufficient literature is available on internet. I was aghast at repeated failure and decided not to continue with PMP certification. In August 2015 one of colleague mentioned the format is changing again in January 2016 after much deliberations I started the preparation again and sticked to a timetable and I must admit prepcast and simulator were immensely helpful during the PMP journey. I also included formula guide as well arsenal as didn't want to leave anything to chance and scheduled the exam for January 08th 2016 and started working backwards. I gave lot of mock exams and made sure to revise the concepts in areas where I was consistently getting Below Proficient.
Exam day: I created the brain dump including formulas in initial 15 minutes and solve the easy questions and marked the difficult question. I overall took 2 breaks and after completing the first round then attempted the difficult questions which were marked for review and then used 20 minutes for final review and finally cleared the elusive PMP exam which has been a dream since past 7 years.
Only piece of advice will be to attempt many mock exams from Rita Mulachy as well as from simulator from OSP and review weak areas and give exam in a positive frame of mind, understand the concepts and don’t ever give up as Randy Pausch once said “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” [/b]
Now I feel I can clear any certification in the world and currently devoting time to understand various agile practices and DevOps and plan to get the required certification by June 2016.
