Congrats Jens. Glad to see all your hard work paid off.

Tracey

Congratulations Jens and thanks for the details you have provided I am sure it will help other PMP aspirants!

Dear Jens, PMP,

Congratulations.

Thank you for your testimony and strategy you have developed.

Best regards.and welcome to PMP club

Hi everybody!

Passed my PMP exam a few days ago. I need to admit, although I think I was well prepared, it was quite tough and I almost ran out of time. Answered my 200th question exactly at 00:00:02 left. Actually, do not know if it went through finally

I need to mention that I am a non native english speaker and therefore it takes a few seconds more to read through the questions and answers thoroughly. But still I was a little surprised as during the 3 full prep tests I did I had 20 minutes left every time. However, my personal strategy in general was that I intended to answer correct at the first time and do not revert back and review the answers. i.e. I rather spent a few seconds more on every question to be sure to answer correctly. That was a lesson learned from my preparations where I realized that for most of the marked questions I kept the answers from the first attempt and for those that I changed I made it wrong in more than 50% of the cases.

I also applied for the language assisstant (in my case German). I will post a separate entry in the forum as I found out that there are not many lessons learned on the language assistant. Even it was a good choice to use the language assistant as it helped me out in approx 10 questions, it also took some time to use it and is one of the explanations why I used more time than during the prep exams.

In general, the questions were quite short compared to some of the lengthy Exam Simulator questions from PM prepcast. Nevertheless it felt that 50% of the questions were somehow „easy“ to answer (when you have learned your stuff!) and the other 50% were quite challenging.

Here my strategy I was following. It might help some of you defining you own strategy:

• I used 2 weeks to define a strategy how to learn, chosed the proper tools and material and created a 10 weeks plan that was detailled on a daily basis for the first 5 weeks and then more broad for the last 5 weeks. I made use of the Rolling Wave Planning Tool and Technique from ... what kind of process? ) and updated and detailled it later during the journey.
• I chosed PM PrepCast as it was perfect for my working and living style with the on demand / downloadable videos via podcast. Great stuff! Thanks to Cornelius and team!
• The first week was to get used to the material and topic. The next 5 was to watch the videos and study PMBOK in parallel and in detail and conducted the tests per chapter.
• After 4 weeks Í purchased Rita´s book as I realized (and listened to other advises) that it will be tough to get through the exam without a prep book). Very good choice!
• Week 7 and 8 I studied Rita´s book chapter by chapter and skimmed through the PMBOK in parallel as well as conducted Rita´s test questions in the book
• Week 9 and beginning of week 10 I conducted exam prep questions every day incl. 3 full exams with 200 questions. In parallel I filled my knowledge gaps that popped up during the tests by revisiting PMBOK or Rita´s book. I used the PM PrepCast Exam Simulator and used 3 other free sources on the internet. Overall, including PM PrepCast and Rita´s questions from her book I answered around 1.600 questions.
• During the morning of the day before the exam I refreshed the formulars and the things I had some challenges with to understand or to memorize. Second half and the evening I relaxed ... very good advice from Cornelius, I need to say

Summary:

• It was good to read the PMBOK twice (although my second time was not extremely thorough)
• It was key to have a prep book as it gives a lot of additional explanation, context and understanding that is not in the PMBOK
• PM Prepcast videos extremely good for my situation and for the intro to PMBOK and all the concepts ... and additional hints and tips
• It was really good to have a plan for this learning journey. It drove me through, gave good guidance where I was and what was left as well as what still needed to be done to reach the target.
• Do a lot of exam prep questions. It is a total different story to understand the stuff by reading it compared to applying it in the way the exam is asking.
• I spent at least 2 – 3 hours per day and 6 – 8 hours on the weekends learning. My guess is that it is quite hard to get throught it in less than 2 months time especially when you have a job and a family.

Good luck for all who are still on the journey or intend to start! /Jens