PMP Requirements

What does it take to be a project management professional? There are 4 key elements in the process of getting to the PMP: education, project management education, which is not the same thing, project management experience, and passing the exam. It starts with education. Before you can sit for the exam, you must have a high school diploma or a 2-year college certificate or a bachelor's degree or higher. And it will matter later on when we get to the experience which category you fall into. For project management education, you're going to need 35 hours of project management education. Now, it can't be part of the degree program if you're counting your college degree as your education. So it's something you took either before you got your college degree or after you got your college degree. Now, there are a variety of different types of project management education that you can worry about. What counts? Well, exams PM training counts. Any project management-oriented training counts, and it can be internal to your organization or something you took from another vendor. That includes a variety of different types of training: contracts training, if you ever took procurement training, negotiation training— those would definitely count towards toward the requisite 35 hours of project management education. Team building training, leadership training, coaching training, all the kumbaya training, that counts toward the 35 hours of project management education. Ethics training. Many people in the course of their jobs have had to take some form of ethics course. If you took that course, that counts. So ethics training counts, requirements training counts, finance budgeting training— that all counts toward the requisite 35 hours of project management education that you have to rack up in order to sit for the PMP exam. Quality training, Six Sigma training— those count. As does any training you've taken in Agile, Scrum, or Adaptive Management. Any of those training courses will count. But the question then becomes, how do I rack up 35 hours? Well, it's 35 what PMI calls contact hours. Contact hours. A contact hour is the amount of time you spent with your derriere in a chair experiencing educational content. Now, how do you prove that though? Well, if you have a receipt, if you have a syllabus, if you have a certificate, if you have the original notice for the training that you got from the training organization, if you have an HR department and your HR department can actually give you a printout of the training you've taken, it's a good day because your HR department records, your human resource department records, will count as proof that you actually took the training. If all else fails, try to get a note from the teacher. True. That actually counts in terms of affirming to PMI that you took the training. The hardest piece in getting ready to actually sit for the exam for many people is qualifying their project management experience. For those with a high school diploma, Or an associate's degree, you'll have to prove 7,500 hours of project management experience over the last 8 years. And note, I did say project management experience. Simple project experience is not sufficient for PMI. They want to see that you were working with or leading teams. Did you need to have the title project manager? No, but you will need to be able to affirm for PMI that you actually were leading teams, tasks, and projects. That's the piece that they want to see to ensure that you merit sitting for the PMP exam. Those 7,500 hours have to have occurred across a minimum of 5 years in the past 8 years. How does that work? Well, if you took a hiatus from your work, if you were working as a project manager 7 years ago and you spent a good year at it, and then, well, you took 2 years off, and then you spent more time, got the remaining 4 years to your credit more recently, you're covered. That's what you need to have. That's what you actually need to be able to affirm to PMI in order to say, yes, I have 7,500 hours of experience, and yes, I have 5 years experience out of the past 8. As long as you can prove that, you're in pretty good fettle. That's if you have a high school diploma. Now, if you have a bachelor's degree or a master's degree or If you have a doctorate degree. Wow. Neat to be you. And if you have those things, the hours requirement drops dramatically. You only have to account for 4,500 hours of project management experience over the past 8 years. It's still the last 8 years. That's still the timeframe, but you're only going to have to prove 4,500 hours of project management experience in the last 8 years, and they have to have occurred across a minimum of 3 years. That's right, 3 years. 3 years experience, 4,500 hours experience, all wrapped up in the last 8 years. So again, if you were working as a project manager about 7 years ago, and during that time You know what you did? You took a break. You took a hiatus. Good for you. And if you did that, but you came back to work and then you got the last 2 years covered, you're covered. That's what you need to do to account for 4,500 hours and 3 years experience over the past 8 years. Those are the prerequisites to sit for the exam. Now, in order to actually get the PMP or to earn the PMP, You're going to need to be able to pass the exam. Passing the exam requires that you answer a 200-question test at a Pearson VUE testing center. Wow, 200-question test. After PMI has approved your application, it's only 200 questions between you and the certification. PMI doesn't tell us what the exact passing score is, but they do inform us that it's in the neighborhood of about a 70%. So if we know that it's in that 70% range, that means you have to get 70% of the questions right. And that's of the questions that count. What do you mean? Oh, not all the questions count. No, they don't. In fact, 25 of the questions out of your 200 on the PMP are what are called validation questions. It's PMI testing out new questions and saying, hmm, Wonder if that's a good question. And they give them a whirl and you get to tell them whether or not they're good or bad questions. You never actually get to say it. You do that by scoring well or scoring poorly on them. And that's what PMI is going to be looking for. So your real test is 175 questions, but you'll never know which 25 were the mystery questions. So you basically have to answer a 200-question test. And do pretty darn well, about a 70%. You won't know which questions are real and which questions aren't. So you want to do well across the entire 200-question span. And those are the key elements that you need in order to become a certified project management professional.