PMI PMP Project Management Professional – Preparing to Pass the PMP

1. Welcome to the PMP Exam Prep Seminar

Welcome to this first section on your journey to earn the PMP. We have a lot of information to talk about in this section. We’re going to talk about the entire PMP exam prep course. I’m going to show you everything that we’re going to cover in this course. So this is a really good foundation. Foundation. A good overview of the work you have ahead of you. And yes, it’s work. You’re going to have a lot of activities, a lot of assignments. You’re going to be taking a lot of practice exams as you prepare to pass the PMP exam. We’re going to talk about the PMP exam. What are the mechanics of the exam and what’s it like to go into the testing center and to actually experience the joy that is passing the PMP. Well, before we get to actually passing the PMP, let’s talk about how do you pay for the exam. Where do you register for the exam? Do you qualify for the exam?

It’s a question I get from a lot of people. Should I be doing the PMP? Or maybe the CAPM is more appropriate. So we’re going to talk about that upfront. What do you have to have in your experience in your education to qualify for the PMP? We’re also going to look at the audit process. There’s a chance you could be audited as a PMP candidate. PMI will audit a small percentage of people that apply, and it’s a random audit, but we’ll talk more about that in this section. We’re also going to look at the exam application. How do you complete the exam application? There are some very specific that you have to do when you fill out this application. So we’ll look at that, and then I have an assignment for you where you’re actually going to go out and start to complete your PMP exam application. So we’ll spend some time there as well. Okay, that’s what’s in store for you in this first section. Let’s hop right in and get going. I’ll see you in the next lecture.

2. Explore the Entire Course

In this lecture, I want to walk through everything you can expect in this course. So we’re going to explore the entire course and what you can expect and what you’ll see so you can set expectations first off the course outlined by the section. So each section, how the course is divided up, has lectures, lectures inside of it. So these are the different sections. So preparing to pass the PMP, get the most from this course. We’ll talk all about the resources and some strategies here on how you can get the most from the course. We’ll look at the PMP exam domains, the Pinback Guide, six editions. We’re going to walk through that.

Project Management Foundations, talk about related areas of project management, different project management, components, project environments, the role of the Project Manager. And then we get into the specifics to the Pinbock. And now we’re actually components, Environments and the role of the PM. That’s chapters one, two and three in the Pinbock. But the really specific stuff in the Pinback Guide begins in chapter four of the Pinbock, and that’s Implementing Integration Management. So we’ll have a whole section on that and it’ll be going to chapter five in the Pinback, Managing Scope. We’ll talk about schedule management, cost management, quality management, resource management, communications management, risk management, procurement, stakeholder and the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. So you can see it really follows the Pimbuck guy. These are each sections in this course. And then I do a blitz review. It’s kind of a last minute cram or a way to encapsulate everything that we’ve talked about through the course, and then we’ll wrap it all up. So these are the outlines and I’m going to show you in a moment here how you can navigate to a specific topic if you want to fast forward or review how you can get to a specific section in the course. So let’s do that. Now, I want to give you just a quick interface.

Now what I’m going to show you is from one of my older courses, so don’t go looking for these lectures of the same content. I just mainly want to show you how to get around inside of the player. So let’s hop over there. Now, so this is the old player here and I’ve paused it. So if I hit Play down here in the lower left. So this is play. And for our sake, I’m going to turn this guy off. So this is an old video, but I’m just showing the mechanic. So here in the corner is the Play or pause if you want to hear something again or you want to review this little 15 with a circle. You can click that and it’ll go back 15 seconds. Or you can click it and it’ll go forward 15 seconds. If I’m really boring or really slow, which according to my wife, that happens sometimes, you can speed up or slow down the speed. So that’s what we’re looking at here in the corner. So if you want to listen to me twice as fast, you can click the two X there and it will play twice as fast. So maybe for a quick review, that’s great. Or if you want to slow it down and really soak it up so you choose what’s good for you.

Of course, one time is normal speed. In the upper left hand corner is the name of the video you’re watching. This is before you begin right now. There’s the section and the lecture number. When you hover your mouse up in the left hand corner, you click this little menu all the way in the left, whatever that guy’s called, and that will show you the entire course layout. So if there’s a section that you want to jump to, you just click that and this will show the entire course outline, basically. And then you can click any section. And then you can see the lectures underneath. Notice that some of these lectures have something in blue.

So in this older course, of course, it’ll be different in our course right now, this is old. For just example sake, if you click any of these things in blue, these are the resources in the lectures. I’ll mention a resource so you know that’s how you’re going to go get the resource. So that’s one of the places that resources are found. And so you can see them all at once over here. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, then you can see how much further you have to go. And then you can see how many have you completed of each section. When you want to put that guy away, just exit and you’re back into the course across the bottom. Here some interesting things. We have browse, q and a So if you have a question, you can go here. And maybe other people have had the same question regarding that lecture.

So this is where you interact with me. This is the best place to do it. Don’t send me an email. Don’t track me down through Facebook. Send a message right here because other people may have the same message or have already asked it. In addition, I have some teaching assistants that work with me because I’m not available. Twenty four seven. And I know that this information is critical to you as you work to pass your exam.

So I have other people that also help besides me answer questions in the course. So if you send me an email, it’s just going to get backed up in my email queue. It’s better to come here first in the Browse Q and A and look to see if other people had the same question. And you can ask your question as well, and then they’ll respond to you, they being me or the teaching assistants that I work with. In this course, you can add a bookmark. If you want to come back and watch it later, you need to pause it. Although I think most of these lectures you’re going to find are short enough. You can watch them in one setting, but you can add a bookmark. And especially for review, this and there you go. So later, when you want to come back to your BOOKMARKS, it’ll show up. Let me pause here. Move this guy out of the way. It’ll show up where the bookmark is. So it’s a handy little feature. You can hop back and forth and you can bookmark different things. So here’s 134 people bookmark this point. Let’s see what other people have bookmarked. Oh, it’s how to get for that old course, the certificate. Then I’ll talk about that coming up. So very interesting. All right, then we have some captions here. They’re not the best, I’m going to say they’re improving.

So maybe by the time you get through here, they’ve improved. But we have some captions that you can turn on or off. There’s the sound. We have some technical stuff here with these gears where if the quality doesn’t look good or it’s really buffering, sometimes if you reduce the quality, it’ll improve. There’s some keyboard shortcuts. This is also where you go to report a technical issue. If you contact me or post in here that, hey, it’s buffering too long. Or I can’t download this resource or I can’t log in, or I guess you’d be logged in if you could get here. But something that’s technical, I have no control over it. So it’s best to give a report a technical issue here.

Okay? Because if you email me that or post it, we’re just going to tell you have to contact Udemy support. As much as I would love to help you and get in there and solve the problem, I have no control over it. Technical support. And actually Udemy support is very, very good. So beware of that. And then if you want to go full screen and kind of hide everything now it’s like you’re at the movies. So there you go. And then we can get out of there. You can just hit exit or escape. Rather to get out, you can also in the upper right hand corner, go to the dashboard. So the dashboard is the whole course where you can hop to specific things. Also in the dashboard, you can see you can go to Q and A, you can look at the different BOOKMARKS. I give announcements periodically.

And then there’s some options here where you can check things out as far as the options back to the course content, the current section you’re in. Or you can look at all the sections and then you can also see all resources. So this is where you can see get all the resources to download that are included with this course. And this, of course, is where you can search what the current section are all sections. You can search for a particular keyword or scroll through the outline. All right, so that’s how you get around in the course. It’s pretty straightforward, but I think it’s important to do that. I get a lot of email questions or how to contact me about this stuff, so there you go. So it’s pretty straightforward now, you know, it’s in the course. All right. Got some of that business out of the way. Let’s keep going going and get into the good stuff. I’ll see you in the next lecture.

3. All About the PMP Exam

As you know, not everyone can take the PMP exam. You have to qualify in order to take the exam. And notice here I’m saying take the exam. Our mindset, though, is passing the exam. Just because you qualify for the exam certainly does not mean you can pass the exam. So let’s talk about how to qualify for the exam. What’s the bare minimum here that you need in order to qualify? Well, the PMP requirements, you’ll complete your application online. Once you complete this application, you’ll get a response about whether you’ve been audited or not. You’ll get an eligibility letter from PMI that will have your authorization to test letter via an email. And you have one year from when you’ve been approved to actually go and pass the exam. Now, an individual, not you, but an individual, they can take up to three times within one year to attempt to pass the exam. You aren’t going to need three times, of course, but you can take up to three times in one year.

If an individual fails the exam three times in one year, they have to wait an entire year before they can reapply. But that is not going to be you. You’re going to knock this thing out. So we’ll keep that positive mental attitude. There are two paths to certification, with a college degree or without a college degree. Let’s talk about with a degree first. So starting at step one here, within the last eight years, you have to have 36 non overlapping months of project experience. So you have to have project management experience or leading project management task. Step two, within the last eight years, your cumulative experience must be 4500 hours leading project management task. Step three, you need 35 contact hours of project management education. That’s this course. That’s why a lot of you are taking this course. Step four is you could have a possible audit and we’ll talk more about audits coming up. And then step five, you have to complete the four hour exam. PMI doesn’t tell us what the passing score is. It’s a pass fail exam, but they’ll give you some idea, some metrics, as if you’re above target or below target or things like that.

So it’s a four hour exam, they don’t tell us the passing score. So this is if you have a college degree, or better, if you only have a high school diploma or a global equivalent, you can still qualify for the PMP. It’s just you have some more stringent requirements. You can see. Step one, within the last eight years, you need 60 non overlapping months of project management experience. Step two, you need 7500 hours leading project management task. Step three, same thing, 35 contact hours. Step four, a possible audit. And step five, passing the PMP exam. Let’s talk about this first step we saw. With a degree you need 36 non overlapping months, and with a degree you need 60 non overlapping months. Well, what does it mean by a non overlapping month? Consider the unique months of experience.

Let’s say this is you. Projects one, two and three all overlap, right? Because project One is happening from January into May, project two is happening from February into about July, and project Three starts in May, and it goes all the way out to October. So a unique month of experience means not the number of projects that you managed, but the number of months you were serving as a project manager, actually, that you were on the bench, that you were actually managing projects. So I can’t say here, well, I get one month for January, 1 for February, 1 for March, 1 for April, 1 for May. I can’t take five months for Project One and then say now project two, it goes February to July, so that’s five more months. And then May to October for project three.

No, it’s unique months. So in this instance, you get one month for January, 1 month for February, and so on. Any time that I’m working as a project manager role, that time counts as unique months of experience. Just because projects overlap doesn’t mean I get double the hours or double the months of experience. So in this instance, that’s twelve months. Even though there are multiple projects, that’s twelve months that are non overlapping, twelve months total experience, I don’t get to count it double because there’s multiple projects or two or three times. However, if I work 20 hours on project

One and 20 hours on project Two, and even 10 hours on project three, that’s cumulative. Those count towards the 4500 or the 7500 hours that you would need depending on with a degree or without a degree. So that you do get to count the number of hours that you work. But the number of months have to be unique. So basically with a degree, you have to have three years managing projects. Without a degree, you have to have five years managing projects. So that’s the catch. There are the unique months of experience. Your PMP exam fees. All right? Yes.

There’s going to be a fee, $405 if you’re a PMI member. As of right now, it’s 340 euro. $555 if you are not a PMI member or 465 euro. It cost $129 to join PMI plus $10 application fee, or 105 plus ten euro. So let’s think about this. $405 if you are a PMI member. That’s what the exam will cost you. It’s basically $139 to join PMI. So you take 405 plus $139. Just say 140, you’re looking at 445. So you save about $10 here by becoming a PMI member. And you can do the same with the euro. You can do the math. You can see it’s more cost effective to join PMI and get a small reduction. The other reason to join PMI is you get access to the Pimbuckeyed in electronic format. You also get a host of other resources and benefits. But that’s one of the primary things is you get these resources as part of your membership. The one thing I didn’t put on this slide, and I’ll go ahead and mention now, is you also want to consider joining your local PMI chapter. I’m a big proponent of local PMI chapters. It’s a great way to meet your colleagues or to network with people in your area. You get to hear different guest speakers. They meet usually about once a month.

They have a little dinner and there’ll be a guest speaker. It’s good networking, good for job hunting, things like this. Just a great way to network in your community. And I always enjoy going when I travel, I often speak at different PMI chapters. If you’re a PMI chapter member and you like to have me out, you can always reach out to me. But if you are looking for a place to network, I really encourage you to go to these PMI chapters. And it’s usually about twenty dollars to forty dollars a year, depending on where you are. But it’s a really good thing to do. So you pass the PMP now. What do you do? Well, I think it’s really important that right now you not only set a goal to pass the PMP, but you also set a goal of how you’re going to reward yourself when you pass the PMP. Make it something valuable or something that you normally wouldn’t do.

You can do anything from you’re going to go see a great movie, or you’re going to travel, take a weekend away with your sweetheart and go see a play or a concert or something. Maybe there’s a favorite restaurant that you’re not going to go to until you pass the exam, and then you’re going to go and have that nice meal or do something extravagant. You’ll take a cruise or a vacation, but I think you want to create a reward for you. Do some rewards and recognition for the work that you’re putting in. After you pass the PNP, then you have to worry about professional development units.

 We don’t need to worry about that now. If you’re not a PMP, you want contact hours. This course is contact hours. So after you’re a PMP, then you get PDUs. So then after the PMP, you need 60 PDUs per three years. And I’ll talk more about that later. And then share your story, encourage others, come back into the class, post a review, get in your Facebook groups, your LinkedIn groups, and tell, tell other people what worked for you. And so share your story, encourage others, and let them know that they can do it. Just like now, you can go and look at other people that have taken this course or some of my other classes, and they’re telling you, yes, you can do it. And that if I can do it, you can do it.

4. All About the PMP Exam

Let’s talk a little bit more about the PMP exam details. What you can expect when you go into the testing center, what you can expect as you take the exam, so nothing will rattle you. So let’s talk about, first off, the PMP exam details. The exam has 200 questions total. There’s 175 of these questions will actually count towards your score. What about these other 25 questions? These other 25 questions are considered seated questions. They don’t actually count to your score, but you don’t know if you’re answering a seated question or a live torture score question. A seated question means that it’s seated. It’s sprinkled in throughout your course because you’re answering a question to help determine if that’s a good question to put into the future population of exam questions.

So a seated question, you don’t know if it’s live or not when you answer it, so you have to answer all 200. So don’t leave a question blank. You have 4 hours to complete the exam. So 4 hours total from when you first begin all the way to the end. So about 50 questions per hour is about how you can pace yourself. So those are the exam details. When you go to the Testing Center, you are not allowed to take anything with you into the test room. The proctor of the Testing center will give you six sheets of paper or a whiteboard. You don’t get to choose which one you want. They’re going to give you six sheets of paper or a whiteboard. You want a dry erase board. You’ll also get two pencils or a dry erase marker. Obviously, if you get the whiteboard, you’re not getting pencils, so they’ll kind of sync it up there. You don’t get to choose, though.

Questions are based on the project management titles. So like the Pmbok Guide, their standard for project management, different guides that PMI publishes, primarily the Pinbock Guide. However, it’s not limited to only the Pinbox. So throughout this course and throughout other courses, people would say, hey, I don’t find this term in the Pinbox. Why are you asking me this? Because it’s not. The only thing you’re tested on this is right from PMI’s website that it’s project management titles that PMI has produced or published. But it’s not limited to PMI global standards. So if it’s in this course, there’s a pretty good chance it’s there for a reason, based on my experience. And it teaches for a number of years. So just take my word for it. If it’s in this course, you need to know it now. You cannot do a brain dump as soon as you get in there.

There used to be a really neat trick you could do where you would go into the Testing center, sit down, and begin dumping out all your notes while the tutorial ran. Not anymore. You can’t write anything down until the exam starts, until the four hour timer begins. It’s just the way it is you can no longer write anything down. Even though you’re in the testing center and you’ve not smuggled anything in with you, you can’t write anything down. The exam software is really pretty easy to use. There is a tutorial, as I mentioned, it explains how to use the software. If you’re anxious about it, you can use the tutorial. But really, if you’ve ever been on a computer, it’s going to be pretty obvious. You can move forwards and backwards. You can go up and mark a question for review. Like you’re really stumped on this question. So I’m going to check it and I’ll mark it for review at the end of the course.

Now what I like is a new feature in their testing software is you can strike out answers. So if you know that answer A is no good, so you can click this button for strikeout and come down and strike out answer A. So it doesn’t count that one. Well, I mean, if you choose it, it counts, but visually, you know, you don’t want to choose A. You can also there’s a highlighter so you can click this tool in the software and come down and highlight keywords. So as you’re taking the test, you can kind of use that to help you figure out what answers may be.

As I mentioned a moment ago, you don’t want to leave anything blank. So blank answers are scored as incorrect. Just because you mark a question, as long as you choose something that doesn’t affect your score, marking it or not does not affect your score. It only affects your score is if it’s wrong, then obviously that’s wrong or you leave it blank. So never leave an answer blank. What a lot of people do. What I think is a great idea to do is if you don’t know market and then on your scratch paper, one of those six sheets jot down a note, that’s number 15. And here’s I think what I think it is.

But I’m going to go ahead and choose A for now and if you have time, come back and review it. If you run out of time, at least you have something. Even if it’s a guess, you have something selected because a guess has a 25% chance of being right. If it’s blank, it has 100% chance of being wrong. So go figure. Now let’s talk about the exam details. All right, so the exam is broken up into these five domains initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and closing. The first one initiating. Here you have it’s worth 13% of your exam. There are 26 questions and these are the tasks. We’re going to look at this in more detail coming up. But these are the tasks you have to know for initiating. How to choose a project, how to define the scope. What about documenting the risk, assumptions and constraints? You have to know how to identify stakeholders and do stakeholder analysis.

You have to know how to create a charter or develop the charter, and then how do you get that charter approved. So you have 26 questions on those tasks. Now, these are from the PMP handbook. So you’re going to go get this in just a little bit, but I’m giving you some insight here to the exam. Now, planning is a pretty big domain. There are 48 questions on planning. It’s worth 24% of your exam. So planning activities, you’re going to be tested on recording requirements, constraints and assumptions. Creating a WBS, we’ll see that in chapter five in the pmbok.

Creating a budget plan is part of planning, developing your schedule and your timeline. That’s chapter six in the pmbok, create the human resource management plan, or just the resource management plan. Now in pmbok six, create the communications plan. That’s chapter ten. We have a procurement plan in chapter twelve, a quality plan, a change plan, risk. All of those are for each knowledge area. So basically each knowledge area have at least one plan. You’ll also present the project management plan to the key stakeholders, typically management, maybe your customers in some instances, but they have to approve the plan. You’ll host a kickoff meeting.

So kickoff meeting, we leave planning, we’re going into executing. So you got to host the kickoff meeting is one of the things you’ll be tested on as we leave planning and we go into executing, we have executing the executing domain. It’s 30% of your test, 60 questions. So a really important chunk of your exam is about getting the work done. Makes sense, right? Project management is about getting things done. You’ll manage project resources for execution. You’ll enforce the quality management plan, implement approved changes as directed. We have a change management plan. You’re going to do risk management and respond to risk events.

And then you also do team development. Remember, team development is about mentoring, coaching, motivation, really, some leadership here, some interpersonal skills. Monitoring and controlling is worth 25%. So 50 questions. This is where we will measure project performance. You have changes that happen. You have to verify those changes. You want to make sure your deliverables are of quality. So we’ll have a quality management plan and a way to measure those deliverables for quality. And that precedes acceptance by the customer. You’re going to monitor risk throughout the project and then as needed, you’ll update the risk register. We’ll do corrective actions and then assess any issues. We go manage communications.

You want to keep stakeholders engaged. So chapter 13 of the Pimbaka about stakeholder engagement. Then we get into closing our last domain here. In closing, 16 questions. It’s worth 8% of your test score. Part of closing is to get a final acceptance. You’re going to do operational transfer. You want to ensure financial, legal, and administrative closure. We’ll talk about that coming up later in the course. Create and distribute this final project report. You have to archive records, and then you want to make sure that customers are satisfied. So you need some feedback or a way to measure customer satisfaction. All right, great job finishing this lecture all about the PMP exam. So what you can expect as you go into the testing center and then what are you going to be tested on? Exactly? All right, moving forward, I’ll see you in the next lecture.

5. PMP Exam Application Audit

In the last lecture we were talking about how to qualify for the PMP, and you saw one of the steps was a possible audit. And I just kind of breezed over that idea of an audit. Well, that’s because I wanted to spend a little bit more time about it here at this PMP application. Audit. Yes, you can get audited. But why does PMI audit applications? Why even Bob other with that? There are three primary reasons why. One, it confirms your education and experience. Everyone that applies for the PMP could get audited. There’s always a chance when you apply, there’s a chance. Well, it’s a deterrent that people don’t fake it, that they don’t lie, because if they get caught, they’re out or don’t qualify to take the exam. So it confirms education and experience. It also enhances the credibility of the certification. You may remember a few years ago where a particular certification and it I won’t mention the name, but it wasn’t that hard to find actual test questions online.

Well, the auditing of the application gets rid of those paper certifications. That it’s a hard exam. You have to qualify for the exam. Not everyone can take it. So it makes it a little bit more exclusive or proves experience. And we can get into the whole debate of does it prove experience, do people still lie or not? I think the overwhelming majority of people are honest. I know you’re going to be when you apply. And then the third step is, as I mentioned, it filters out paper project managers that you have to document your experience and then prove that if you get audited, and of course, not everyone will get audited. Here’s the truth about audits.

There’s only one way to avoid an audit, and that’s don’t apply for the exam. There’s no magic word or shortcut that will bypass the potential audit. If you’re going to get audited, you’re going to get audited just the way it is. It’s part of participating in the program. A small percentage of applications are randomly audited. It’s a random audit. Now, PMI can audit based at their discretion, but automatically when you submit your app, you either audit or not. It’s a random process. So audits are random. You can’t avoid the chance of an audit. It’s random, it’s not profiling.

They’re not going to say anyone that uses this particular keyword, we’re going to audit them, or anyone that graduated from this university. No, it’s a random, it’s not profiling. There is a small chance that you’ll be audited. And I’ve met a lot of people over the years who have been audited. So what happens if you’re audited? It’s really not that scary to begin with. It’s your category one or category two. Category one. You verify your PM experience, your contact hours, which will be the certificate from instructing. com this course, also your formal education, so a copy of your college transcripts or your degree if you have a high school diploma. You’re category two. So you verify your PM experience and your 35 contact hours of project Management education. Again, this course.

So then you get into you verify your PM experience. So this is from the audit instructions on PMI’s website. So if you notice, you have to verify your experience. That means your manager, a supervisor or a colleague who has firsthand knowledge of the experience application is required to review and then complete it’s a form, the Project Management Experience Audit Report. So they complete this form and then they put it inside of an envelope and then they sign it across the seal on the back of the envelope. So it would be obvious if someone’s opened it. You do that for every one of your projects you reported on your PNP application. So all of those different projects you have have to have the same process. And then you can’t substitute it. Everything has to be exactly what you put on your application. Then you verify your 35 contact hours of PM education. So notice that you have to give successful completion of each course submitted the required 35 hours of project Management education, a certificate, transcript or letter of attendance in the company registered education provider. That’s us. We are a PMI registered education provider. So our certificate has our logo on it.

That’s what you give to PMI if you are audited after this course and then verify Attained Education category One only. So you have to show your college degree or transcripts. So that’s what you give. You put it all into one envelope and then you’ll send this into PMI. You have 90 days to complete the audit. So you get three months. You put everything in one envelope and then you send it in. You don’t mail in one piece at a time. That’s going to be impossible for them to track and just too messy. After the audit. Then you have one year to complete the exam.

So these three months, it doesn’t eat into your one year window. Once you pass the audit, you have three years from that point. Audits can happen after the exam. There’s always that possibility. You could be audited even after you pass the test. I’ve not met anyone who has experienced that. I’m sure it’s happened. So we just be aware of that and we follow PMI’s rules and their processed with the audit truthfully. It’s not that scary of a thing. I know it seems scary now, but if you’re honest on your application, then it’s pretty easy to complete the audit. Like I said, I’ve met lots and lots of people who’ve been audited. All right, let’s keep moving forward.

6. PMP Coach: Getting Started

Throughout the course, I’ve sprinkled in these little PMP coaching sessions. It’s an opportunity for you and I just to talk bluntly and directly. So I’m going to share with you some just some real coaching advice that you need. This first section, we talked all about the PMP exam, and as far as EMP coaching goals, I think one of the hardest things for people to do is to get started, to take those first steps, those first actions, to move towards any goal. Six years ago, I ran a marathon, and I was right at 5 hours, really slow. I know, I’m not bragging. I was just happy to finish.

That was my fifth marathon that I done. And then I said, no more. I was done with that type of workout. I’m too old for that, right? Well, I got fat, got depressed, got lazy, got old. And six years or actually five years later, I said, you know, this is ridiculous. There’s no reason why I can’t do one more and get back in shape and to feel good in my life again.

So I started taking these little tiny steps to begin working out again, to lose weight, making small changes in my diet. I had to start somewhere. And so over time, it’s like, okay, can I just go for a fast walk and then jog for a block, and then walk for a block, and then run a mile, and then 5 miles, and eventually I was able to run that marathon. In fact, it was six years later, but it was my best time ever. I’m six years older, but I was able to do it in ten whole minutes faster.

Now, to my credit, it was very windy and rainy on that day, and I think I still could have done better. So maybe I’ve got one more marathon in these legs, I don’t know. My point being isn’t to brag about the marathon, because I certainly didn’t win. My point is that in order to hit that goal had to start somewhere, even if it was the tiniest step. So in these early sections, as we think about working towards passing the PMP, you have to start somewhere. You have to take some tiny steps and build on those. And what happens in our life, I think, is that as we create a little goal and we achieve that little goal, that gives us confidence then to create the next little goal and the next little goal and the next goal and the next goal, and then we get that momentum because we have confidence based on what we’ve already done, that we can continue moving forward.

So if you’re ready to move into the next lecture, but you’ve not yet started your PMP exam application, the assignment for this lecture, I really want to encourage you to take some time to hop out there and do that. You will never pass the PMP if you don’t apply for the PMP. So even if you’re you go out there and all you do is enter your name and your address, at least you’ve started. Now you’ve got 90 days to complete it once you’ve started. And I think that’s very feasible for anyone to do. But you’ve got to take some concrete steps. So I want to give you that opportunity now. And when you’re ready, let’s move on and wrap up this section, and then we’ll get into some new material. So I’ll see you real soon.

7. Section Summary: Preparing to Pass the PMP Exam

Great job finishing this first section on earning your PMP. The PMP exam prep seminar is a long course. It’s a big course, and there’s a lot of information that we have to cover. But you’ve done something that a lot of people haven’t even attempted. A lot of people will be scared of the PMP, so they don’t try or they’ll get their nerves up. So they purchase this course on the PMP exam prep, but they don’t make it this far. They delay and procrastinate, and they don’t start well. There’s a project manager. You know, that often the hardest part is just getting started, and that’s what you’ve done already. So in this first section, we talked about what we’re going to cover in this course, what you and I are going to do together as we move through this course.

We looked at the PMP exam and what are the mechanics of the exam, how much does the exam cost, how do you complete the exam application. We also talked about how do you qualify for the PMP. So you want to make certain that you have the education which this course will suffice the 35 contact hours from this course. We also talked about whether you have a degree or without a degree, and how does that affect the PMP exam application and then also your years of experience as a project manager. We talked about the audit process, and there’s a chance that you could get audited when you submit your application.

And as you now know, it’s really not that big of a deal. It’s just a little tedious process that you have to go through to prove your experience and education. If that’s you complete the audit, but then use that little extra time to have some more study efforts as you prepare to pass your PMP. Don’t let an audit scare you. We talked about the exam application. How do you actually go out to PMI. org and apply for the PMP exam? So we looked at that.

In fact, you did an assignment, which I hope you’re still saving an emotion on the exam application, that you have to complete that. And so that’s something that if you start now and you can complete that as you move through this course. And then if you need this course for your contact hours, you can submit this course as your contact hours, and your exam app is ready to go. And that way, there’s not a delay where you’re studying and then have to fill out the app and then go take the test, and you feel a little disconnected from the information that we’re going to cover throughout this course. All right, you did it. You completed the first lecture, the first section, I should say lots of lectures on earning your PMP. Okay, good job. I’ll see you in the next section. Keep moving forward.