I passed the PMP exam today with a lot of hard work and dedication(you can't pass without it). I thought I would post something here for others who are in the process and need some encouragement.
It was very difficult for me to take time out for studying as work and family always keep me busy. I took about 4 months for preparation as cramming does not work for me and also I did not have the time to learn all this material in 6-8 weeks as some people did.
There were many times when I thought that I cannot do this as my memory is not great, these are all normal feelings and one should always challenge themselves.
My preparation method was the following.
- I studied PMBOK 5 once(super boring read) and Rita Mulcahy’s exam prep(which puts PMBOK 5 in perspective and provides good examples)
- Enrolled in a PMP boot camp (but did not attend for first 3 months), this provided me access to a lot of material as part of the package, I used their exam guides and ITTOs cheat sheet daily.
- After 2 months of studying, started taking mock exams. This is a very important step as all exam aspirants need to get used to the tricky situational questions. After each exam, review all right and wrong questions to understand the reasoning. This also helps you try to come up a pattern. You can identify the areas where you have weak knowledge and if needed, re-read that chapter in PMBOK.
- Take exams from multiple sources to go through variety of questions(scenarios) and keep filling the knowledge gap.
- I went to the bootcamp about 60-65% ready. This helped me in understanding the material even better.
- Took the exam 3 weeks after the bootcamp. Those 3 weeks were full of mock exams plus reviews. After a while, you should start to see question patterns repeated, this is a good sign.
Caution: Do not fall for the gimmick where institutes claim to get you fully prepared you in 5 days. There are no shortcuts, even with the money refund guarantee. Know your own limits.
Once you constantly start to get 75-85% scores from the mock exams you are ready.
Free Mock Exam quality: I took my mock exams from multiple sites.
1. Edwel-(difficulty level: moderate)
2. Oliver Lehmann (tough exam but not close to real exam. Many questions on quality theories from people that don’t get asked in the exam)
3. From Rita Mulcahy, good questions, but again not close to the real exam.
4. PMStudy: Very good site for a free mock exam. Almost every question was long winded, which is how the real exam was structured. Of all the mock exams, this had the similar structure.
Final word: After all the prep and constantly getting 76-84% scores in mock exam, I still found the exam to be super tough. Keep your composure, if you don’t know the answer, use process of elimination. Expect each question to be 5-7 lines long (so practice reading keywords to save time). When I was submitting the exam, I did not think I would pass, but ended up getting MP in each of the 5 process group. I do believe that the final scoring and pass/fail determination is done based on the complexity of the exam so keep your fingers crossed when submitting the exam :)