May 2015

Got my PMP

  • Posted on: 7 May 2015
  • By: Jay Oyster

PMP Certificate #1813855After thinking about it long and hard, I finally decided I needed to go out and get the formal project management certfication. So after preparing for about two months, taking a course that WellStar very kindly paid for, and studying like a mad man for about three weeks, I took the PMP test yesterday. It was the hardest test I've taken since I had undergraduate Thermodynamics in 1989. The biggest thing that most people going into the PMP exam don't realize is that it isn't a case of studying the facts. PMI, the company that owns and runs the PMP certfication process, assumes you know the project management rules and terminology. No, the point of the test is to see how you apply them. In particular, they want you to answer with the interpretation of how all of that is applied that they themselves would use. It's a test of situational judgement . . . and you should NOT USE YOUR OWN JUDGEMENT. To pass the test, you have to put on the persona of a PMI certification author and answer with what *they* would do in that situation. And even with that, there are quite a few questions on the exam that seem to be judgement calls that even PMI isn't consistent on. I'd say, to get a perfect score on the PMP exam, you either need to have a psychic link back in time to the mind of the PMI question writer at the time they were writing the question, or you need to be plugged into some sort of PMI zeitgeist that must flow just under the surface of reality, like a Platonic project management reality of pure PMI reason. (a somewhat oxymoronic term, that last.)