TOPIC: Passed on first try - LL

Hi All!
I am proud to share, that I passed the PMP exam yesterday on the first try. Here’s my story:

Application for the PMP exam
Although I’ve more than 10 years’ experience in leading roles for project management in different roles (as head of SW development and project engineering departments in various companies), I never had a training which would count for the 35h project management training for the application.
Hence, my first search on the Internet was to find an online course earning me these hours to be eligible for the application and that’s how I registered for the PM PrepCast from Cornelius Fichter.

Preparation for the PMP exam
I started 3 months earlier to the exam, with the following plan in my mind:

• March: watch as much PM PrepCast videos as my time allows after 10 hours per day as a project manager at work
• April: read the PMBOK once or twice
• May: use the Exam simulator to practice and study especially the wrong answers

As you all know a plan is a plan and reality is a little bit different: watching the videos after work was exhausting, because I easily lost focus – like watching TV. Don’t get me wrong – the videos are excellent and Cornelius is great presenting the slides, but watching all videos is a long journey. Fortunately you can skip some seconds by pressing the right cursor key, but to be honest I did not manage to watch all of the videos.

Nevertheless the videos were a good introduction and kept my interest on a high level. So when I started reading the PMBOK many things sounded already familiar. In my case reading the book was way faster than watching the videos, that’s why at the end I stuck to the PMBOK. One interesting thing to share is, because I’m in parallel executing real projects, by studying the book I was always taking notes what I should do in these projects for improvements, because the ITTO described in the book actually make sense and are appealing.

By the way besides the PMBOK and PM Prepcats videos and exam simulator, I had no more study material and I would recommend less is more. Don’t buy tons of other books, because you would need a very good time management to study them all.

One month before the exam I started to take full four hours exam simulations (managed to complete 3 simulations). My results were between 75% and 80% which is not bad, but I didn’t feel totally confident. However the simulation is really a great preparation for the exam. I learned that the exam duration of 4 hours is more than enough for me to answer all 200 questions (normally I had about 30 minutes left at the end). I only flagged a couple of questions to review and tried to do it right the first time. I learned a lot by studying my wrong answers and got aware to watch for key words in the questions.

The only thing I really learned by heard were the formulas for EVM, number of communication channels and CPM. Not ITTO and name and sequence of all knowledge areas in the process groups, because after reading the PMBOK at least twice you get a natural feeling for it.

The exam
The actual exam took me again 3.5 hours (so the simulation was right about this) and some of the questions/answers are worded a little bit more complicated compared to the simulation. But the challenging level was pretty like the one in the simulation. When I pressed the finalizing button in the exam I was prepared to hold my breath to wait for the result a couple of seconds, but it appeared immediately – so I needed a couple of seconds to realize that I have passed it

Hi Walter,

Congratulations and thank you for sharing your PMP journey!