Things to know before becoming a PMP – Part Eight (Final)

PMI has a certification called the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM). They describe it as a “good entry-level certification.” In this case you either need 1500 hours of professional experience on a project team OR 23 contact hours of formal education. In order to keep your certification current, you must retake the CAPM exam every five years. There are no ongoing PDU requirements. The CAPM exam is based ONLY on the PMBOK. There are areas of study for PMP’s that CAPM candidates do not need to study. These include leadership styles, types of power, ways to manage conflict, motivational theories, and professional responsibility. The CAPM exam consists of 150 questions, 15 of which are pretest and therefore are not scored. The allotted examination time is 3 hours.

Some people choose to get the CAPM just so that they can stay conversant with PMBOK and demonstrate dedication to the profession. It’s your decision as to whether or not it’s worth going for. I will tell you that I have never seen any job advertisements for it so I would consider it to be nowhere near as marketable as the PMP. Try looking at online job ads and see how often it appears.

You said there were a variety of subjects tested on the exam including math, standard deviation and the like. How many questions will I get in the various areas?

I get asked this in every class. And the answer is simple. I have no idea. Nor does any other instructor.  The exam is a random computer-generated test. If you sat down at Prometric and decided to call PMI right at that moment and ask what’s on the test, they obviously wouldn’t tell you. But they also couldn’t tell you. So if you run into a recent PMP and he says, “I got a lot of Risk and Procurement and 10 Earned Value questions and you will too,” don’t believe him. He’s not lying to you. But he’s extrapolating his experience over to yours. You might get a lot of Quality and Time and 2 Earned Value questions. Or you might get a lot of Procurement and Risk and 10 network diagram questions. So there is no other way to prepare than to study everything and assume you can get tested on anything.

As long as I’m considering certification, are there other non-PMI PM certifications out there that I should be considering?

I am aware of at least two other certifications. Caveat – I only know about these through some reading and minor discussion. If you are interested in these you will have to do some investigation on your own. The first one is called Prince2 (for “PRojects IN Controlled Environments) and it is UK-based. In fact it is required by the UK government for all projects it commissions. It is described as a methodology rather than just a body of knowledge as PMBOK is. Even though it’s a UK-based methodology, I know for a fact that some US-based universities, notably Boston University, provide training in it. Secondly, there is a Switzerland-based organization called the International Project Management Association (IPMA). According to their web site, as of the end of 2011 there were over 150,000 certificants worldwide.

My cursory observation is that both of these certifications are likely more rigorous than the PMP and analogous to university-level in-depth trainings. That’s the upside. The downside is that they may not be as recognizable in the marketplace as the PMP currently is. So again you will have to ask yourself this question – Am I trying to become a better project manager? Or am I trying to best position myself in the marketplace. If the former, then the university-level or what I’ll call alternate certifications are best. If you’re competing in the current marketplace for a job, the PMP is a better bet. Now is it fair that the most rigorous certifications are now well-known by hiring managers? No. But life isn’t fair and I certainly didn’t make the rules. Personally I think it’s somewhat incumbent upon the promulgators of these alternate certifications to make hiring managers aware of them and their value. And so maybe one day the hiring manager will say, Show me your IPMA or Prince2 certification.

While researching classes, I keep hearing, e.g., that Rita Mulcahy’s or Andy Crowe’s materials are the only way to go and that I may well fail if I use others.

As mentioned above, I am familiar with Mulcahy’s self-study materials and they are very good. I did not study from them exclusively when I was a candidate but used her book as a supplement to the class I took. But you should know that there are other self-study books (and classes) available. I’m familiar with some and they are also quite good. So I am directly familiar with Andy Crowe (which I teach from) and Achieve materials. They both cover the material well and have self-test questions. And I have not used but have heard good things about Kim Heldman and Head First. Plenty of people have studied from these materials either by themselves or through a class and passed. So despite what you hear, I maintain that unless the materials are really horrible, do not stay close to the PMBOK, and have no self-test questions, you can pretty much go with any of these vendors. Because the key to passing via self-study is diligence. And the key to passing via instructor-led study is the instructor AND diligence.

FYI, PMI is currently working on a Fifth Edition of the PMBOK. (Fourth edition is current and is the one you should be studying from). The PMP exam won’t reflect the Fifth Edition for quite some time, probably mid-2013. So if you’re studying now, don’t worry about it.

So should you get your PMP? As mentioned I can’t answer that for you. But hopefully some of the information in this series will assist you in making the decision a little easier. I can say that having it has benefited me greatly in my career. Even if I weren’t teaching it, I would still go out and get it today. I find that it has not only broadened my scope of PM understanding but it has kept me marketable. And let’s face it, it’s a really tough job market out there.

And that’s it. There’s probably more that I could say but you can get more details out of the PMP handbook. (And I haven’t even talked about PMI’s other certifications which you can read about here under Quick Links.

Hope this series of posts was useful for you. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at jpstewar@rcn.com or comment on my blog.NOTE: I will be presenting much these same concepts in a free one-hour live webinar on June 14. I will advertise how to attend that in my next blog post.

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