PMP Application Examples + Process

Hi, I'm Karl Pritchard, and I want to walk you through the joy that is filling out the PMP certification exam application. First thing you're going to want to do is go to the PMI website and create yourself an account. My assumption is you don't have any heartburn with that because here's the good news: it doesn't cost you a cent. You just go to the PMI website, give them your salient information, and plug it all in there, and then you'll be able to follow the links to certification, specifically to the certification program. You're going to be able to follow the links over to the certification program by clicking Apply Now. That's right, Apply Now. You do want to go ahead and apply now. Now you'll notice in my example here it says continue working on the PMP application. It says to continue working on it. Now I'd also like you to just make some notes here and specifically The notes that I'd like you to make, the ones that I would be expecting you to do, are to look down at the bottom where it says Download Application. Because I've already been working on an application in here, that means I can look at the work that I've done. I can save it as a PDF. I can send it off to people for review. I can do all of those wondrous things just by virtue of that download button. As you move forward through the application, it's going to ask for your address. Now oddly enough, and you'll notice it says add work address, now that's a distinct possibility here. Adding your work address might be something you want to do if you change work addresses less often than you change your Home address. Some people have a boss for whom it's the office du jour program. They love to just move offices. My old boss used to move us from one side of the District of Columbia to the other on a regular basis, and it was his thing. Oh, we're moving to the 6th floor of this building instead of the 8th floor. Oh, thank you very much. And we would just shuffle around through variety of different addresses. I used my home address. However, if you're one of those people who changes apartments on a weekly basis, might be time to use your work address. Use one where you actually live. Your contact information is just that— it's your contact information. Where can people actually reach you? And that, that matters. In fact, it is one of those important things because sometimes people shift email addresses almost as readily as they shift everything else. So once you finish that, then we can move on to attained education. Now notice the first bullet up there, and this freaks some people out. Did you graduate from a PMI-GAC accredited university program? The reality is PMI uses that for statistical purposes only. So if you don't know or you're not sure, just say no and move on. If you really want to dig into it, then go ahead and dig into it, and they will help you find out whether or not your program was PMIGAC accredited. But frankly, it really doesn't buy you any stock. You'll notice I put my high school in here. I actually graduated from The Ohio State University, but I put my high school in here just because I wanted to make the point of the differing hours between high school and college, because PMI does make that distinction. They will expect you to know that distinction, and you'll put the right thing in there. And then down at the bottom where it says attained education, that's actually a drop-down menu, and your options include high school diploma, And bachelor's degree. Carl, there's several others in there as well. Yeah, but the reality is what you're looking at is high school diploma and bachelor's degree, because once you've got your high school diploma, you've got the same level as someone who has their associate's degree in PMI's eyes. That's one key distinction there. And if you have your bachelor's degree, here's some nice news for you. You have the same cred as someone who has their doctorate. Yeah, once you get your bachelor's degree, you're into the second tier of PMI PMP people. So you're choosing either high school diploma or bachelor's degree, no matter which one of these that you happen to click. So no matter which one you click, you're going to pick the honest one, obviously, and you're going to move forward from there. Doesn't matter how long ago you got that particular credential, really doesn't matter. PMI is good with that. So from there, you're going to move forward into the overall requirements to sit for the exam. And I, I want you to look at this because you're going to have to capture project management experience at the different levels. Notice, got a college degree or the global equivalent, that's going to be 4,500 hours over the past 8 years in a 36-month window. Doesn't have to be the same 36-month window. Some of it could be going back 5 years, some of it could be last year, doesn't really matter. And if you have a high school diploma, a secondary degree, well, then you've got to cough up 70 7,500 hours of experience. 7,500 hours of experience over 5 years, over a 5-year span within the past 8 years. Once you've got those particular elements in hand, then what you're going to have to do is make sure that you have your project management education hours properly accounted for. Did you take a course? Did you go through Exam PM course? Did you go through some other training? And remember that project management education isn't all with the words project management in the title. Some project management education could be contracts training. It could be training that you took related to quality or to leadership Anything that falls within that big box of what is PMI expecting of certified project management professionals. So as you go back to your PM experience hours, you're going to want to capture any training you've done. Also, you're going to have to prove it if you happen to get audited. If you do happen to get audited, Just relax. A word of reassurance, if I might, and that is any form or format that you've captured your project management education, it's going to be fine. Do you have an old certificate that you got for taking the training? Great, good to be you. That's going to be fine. That's going to be enough to keep PMI happy. Do you have, if not a certificate, do you have a printout from your HR department? that actually says you took the training. That's good enough. One student actually told me she was freaked out because all she had was the printout of courses taken from her HR department, and she said, and I quote, looked like it came off a 9-pin dot matrix printer. It looked so cheesy. Was PMI going to take that? They did. She survived the audit. Nothing but good news. So then the next big piece of this, and that is your experience. That is your experience. Can you actually capture, can you actually reflect on, can you actually drill down to the experience that PMI wants to be able to see on your application? When you go into Add Experience, you'll notice I've pre-populated these boxes. But as you go into Edit Your Experience, I want to just share with you some of the critical things that you're going to be putting in here. First is the project title. What the title of it is, I don't care, but you want to make sure that you have a good clean title For what your project is. You want to make sure that it actually reflects what PMI, if they audited you, would be able to ask somebody about the ACME project. Oh yeah, the ACME project. They would know that you were speaking the same gospel as the other people in your organization. Start and finish date. Just be aware, if you go back more than 8 years, Some of that is going to vanish. Some of that is going to disappear. Some of that is not going to be present, and it's not going to count towards the required 4,500 or 7,500 hours of project management experience. So if you go back beyond the 8 years, they don't punish you for it, but they are also not giving you credit for it. Just be braced for that. And now look at all the options here for your project role from this dropdown menu.

Wow.

You'll notice I picked other task leader, but there are a host of different options here, and there's only one out of this entire dropdown that is bad news. That's it— project contributor. Project contributor. That's bad news. Genuinely bad news.

The reason that's bad news is because project contributor says I was a worker bee.

I did not do any heavy lifting. I really didn't do project management per se. It was just well work for me. You don't want to be perceived as a project contributor if you feel compelled. To say I was a project contributor, fine, then pick other, but pick any of these others except for project contributor. Pick other, call yourself a task leader. That works. That covers it.

And that puts you into a safe space. And as far as what industry you're in, PMI genuinely doesn't care.

Moving forward, we can then go in and start looking at Organizational details.

And I want you to take note. Organizational details.

My job title, amazingly gifted project manager. Thank you very much. My organization's name, PMA.

PMA. The address should be an address where your organization was last seen.

Uh, Carl, actually our office has burned down, went down to the ground. There was nothing left. It's a pile of rubble. Do they have a current office? Use that address. No, no, nope, they went bankrupt after that. It was pretty horrible. They just basically called it.

They just dropped it all the way.

They got rid of the organization altogether. Okay, last known. Every organization has a last known address. Pick that one. More important is what's going to come up on the next screen.

And that is the organizational contact. This is the single most important person in your world should you get audited. If you get audited, this person is going to be the make or break for you. So first and foremost, that contact name should be someone who likes you.

Yeah.

I'm not being insincere. Should be someone who likes you. And when you go to give them a job, there's the dropdown.

Just a word of warning. Give them a job that quite frankly, well, reflects them.

Primary stakeholders, the safest place to go. Because if they were a project sponsor, they were a primary stakeholder.

They were a client, they were a primary stakeholder.

If they were a manager, director, they were a primary stakeholder.

And if you pick primary stakeholders, Nobody's going to argue with you.

It's the perfect choice. And give real contact information, because if you get audited, PMI may reach out and contact these people. These people will have to attest that everything you wrote on your application was, well, you. It was really about you. It's what you really did.

It really reflects Everything that you were.

That's why you want these people to be down the hall. You do not want them to be across town, across the country, halfway around the world. Bad news for an organizational contact. You want them to be somebody you can physically reach out and touch, because in exchanging paperwork, if you get audited, it's actual paperwork. It's not faxes. It's not email. They have to actually sign things and then seal an envelope and sign across the seal of the envelope. That creates a real headache if they're halfway around the world. So the real trick here is pick somebody who likes you, somebody who can be a primary stakeholder to your project, and somebody down the hall. Somebody you can go to and say, here are the forms, just need you to sign them. Seal them and deliver them back to me. That's all I really need. If you can find that individual, you have found the perfect experience element to incorporate into your project, and that's nothing but good news. So once you have an organizational contact who will attest to the fact that yes, this is exactly what she did, she did it well, bravo, somebody who will agree with you about your description of your project, your description of your role, all that information, then you can start cataloging hours in the domain areas. You have to have hours someplace in your application, not necessarily for every project, in each of the domains: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. These are the domains of project management, and the expectation is You're going to have hours across these, but if you put hours in one of these boxes, you'll need to attest to it when you move forward and you go ahead and start filling out the experience description. The other thing, don't put the same number of hours in each box. That's nothing but bad news.

I want you to read what PMI is asking for here.

It says in the space below, and then it gives you a bulleted list of exactly what they want to see in the space below. They don't want to see a narrative. They want to see these elements in the space below.

People get carried away here.

They— oh no, I'm going to change this out. I'm going to write a little story down below. I want to take that paragraph out of my resume because it's a really good paragraph. Don't do that. Do exactly what they're asking for, bullet by bullet, one by one, and then write them out in the space below. Now you may notice initiating, planning, executing— I've got descriptions after each one of these. Where did I come up with those?

Back here.

I came up with those back here. I looked at the descriptions under initiating, and I looked at the words they used there And then I plugged them in on the following page. Ditto with planning. Ditto with executing. For each one of these, I just went through, chose a couple of salient words that really reflected what we did on that particular project, captured that information, and then plugged it in on the following page. If you look, those descriptions Down below where it says initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing. When you look at those descriptions, they look eerily like the descriptions from the prior page. They look a lot like the stuff that was on the previous page. Because I know that, because I have that information at my disposal, I can now make them mirror this. Some people want to get into a long narrative about, oh, but here's what we really did that was so impressive on this project. PMI doesn't care. What they really want to see is this. And note that this has to be done in 300 to 550 characters. 300 to 550 characters is not a lot of characters. That's not words, that's characters. So you need to capture a whole project in 300 to 550 characters.

This is how that gets accomplished. This is the way in which that actually gets done. Now down below, one of the nice things that they do, do for you is that they actually have a tracking mechanism that keeps an eye on, are you greater than 300 characters, are you less than 550 characters, and you'll note I'm able to achieve that I was able to get that done. It's a beautiful and a wonderful thing. I can now go through and I have my experience submitted. All I have to do is cough up another 135 hours. How come I'm 135 hours short when this was a zillion-hour project? Well, that's because a lot of those zillion hours stretch back more than 8 years from the day I started this application. Well, crud! So now I've got to find another project and make up those last missing hours. I've got to find a way to actually squeeze out those last missing hours from one of my other projects. Then once I've got that in hand, I can go ahead and save this and march ever forward. They'll let you take one last look at your education. They'll ask you for optional information, but let me make note, it's optional. It's just that, it's optional. You don't have to go there. And on your certificate, whatever you put in here, even if you foul this up royally, you have your hands over one key from the home keys, oh my gosh, it won't matter. That'll be your PMI name from now and forevermore. So triple-check this before you march forward and say, Yeah, that's what I want my name to read on my certificate. Don't assume that they're gonna get that right. They even give you this last chance. They say, hey, just a heads up, is this the way you want it to appear? Okay, if you're good with that. And this last page, this is the PMI Code of Ethics. This is what you're agreeing to when you sign up to sit for the exam. You are the most ethical person God ever put on the face of the planet. PMI says that you are agreeing not to share the actual questions off your exam with other PMP candidates. PMI says on this page you are the most ethical person ever put on the face of the earth. For the exam, you need to actually answer questions that way. For the exam, you need to be comfortable with that. And for the exam, you need to recognize you are taking on a great challenge. Because of that, there are rules to the road. There are rules to be followed. There are expectations as to the behaviors you're going to have when you sit for the exam. That's what you're signing up for. That's what you're agreeing to on this last page of the application. And once you submit it, you're committed. You're saying, these are the things I have agreed to. You're not committed to actually sit for the exam when you finish this. Some people freak out and say, so do I have to pay now? No, you don't have to pay until you're actually kind of geared up and know when you're ready to sit for the exam. But it's a good idea to have in your head At least a ballpark of when you think you might actually be sitting for the exam. But that's how you get through the application. It's a little daunting, but you can do this!

Thank you!