PMP Certification

PMP (Project Management Professional) Certification from PMI Organization is well recognized for the project management personnels. There are several other project management certifications like PRINCE2, ITILv2 (more for IT infrastructure).

Prerequisites:

4500 hours of project management work.

35 hours of project management training.

Fees:
PMI Membership : $129 (recommended)
PMP Exam Fee (for members) : $405
PMP Exam Fee (for non-members): $555 


Application Process:

Most of the people have several questions on filling the application

I'm not in to development and working only in support projects. How can I fill my experience?
I don't know how much time I spent on each process group areas?

In the whole project work that you are doing, your work will always falls in all or some of  the five process groups: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitor and control and Closing.

So you can categories the no.of hours for each process groups and fill in the hours based on percentages incase you are not sure about the exact no.of hours. 

For e.g. * 
Start Date: 01-Feb-2009
End Date: 19-Apr-2011
Total No. of Hours : 4616


This total no. of hours can be divided into certain percentage of effort that you have put in each process group and further divided into each item under each process.


Initiating: 10%
Planning: 30%
Executing: 20%
Monitor and Control: 30%
Closing: 10%


*Note: This example is for only illustration purpose. The hours and percentages may differ for each person and type of work.


Also you need to mention the person who can authenticate the details of the project that you are listing in the Application.  Have the contact details of the person ( the person can be your direct supervisor, manager, or stakeholder)
. 
PMI Audit:
PMI can audit the details that you have listed in the application at any time so give only the legitimate details.

Preparation:

PMP Certification preparation does take some time, but its not that bad as we think (including me). It took a month for me to prepare for the exam after a PMP training  from Progressive Ventures - Proventures (PMI R.E.P).

Here are few steps you can follow:

"My approach was to get brief first and then get into detail. So read one knowledge area at a time."

• Start with the brief details first on each knowledge area so that you don't get too much at a time.
• Take online exam to find the gaps.
• Go through the PMBOK Latest Edition for the same knowledge area and try to get some answers to the gaps.
• Certain Tools/techniques and terms may not very detailed in PMBOK, so use online resources like Google and Wikipedia (believe me there is lot of information available).
• After detail reading, take practice test of 50-120 questions(specific to Knowledge Area) and try to analyze the incorrect answers.
• Last day before the exam, you can try to do the exercise of listing down all project management processes associated with Process groups and knowledge areas.

Some Exam Tips:

• You will get 15 minutes to get a feel of the online exam (how to use "Mark for review", and at the end to "Review all questions", "Review marked questions", "Review unanswered questions"). This will help at the end to review your questions and if you are short of time you can review only unanswered or marked for review questions directly.
• In exam you get in-built calculator for any doing calculations.
• Key is not to spend more time on each question instead you can mark it for review and can review later.
• Some questions, we get almost all answers are wrong except one  and for some two answers are correct. So in the later case, you have to use the judgement of what needs to be done first.