Well holy cow/crap, I did it !!!!! I am sitting here stunned, exhausted, exhilarated and humbled by this experience. Where do I start. I enjoyed reading other people’s post-exam experiences and wanted to give back to the PMP community so this is my Christmas gift lol. This is a long review, so grab a coffee and comfy slippers and enjoy. I will start by telling you how my PMP journey started:
In the first weekend of June of 2016, I experienced a serious calamity. I suffered seizures due to chronic dehydration, collapsed and shattered my left shoulder and ended up in Intensive Care Unit at local hospital (Canadian healthcare is fantastic !!!!! Do not believe what the American media has to say about it, they are full of sh*t) for a week followed by surgery and a summer of intensive rehab. As I’m a self- employed consultant, I did not have any sort of work benefits or pay compensation; basically I was not working for the entire summer and had zero income coming in and only expenses going out. I had experienced a similar period a few years ago; no serious calamities but was out of work for about 6 months and it hurt financially. But, that time I did nothing with my time off. This time, I vowed to make the very best of my time and turn a bad situation into a good one. So, I started by doing my ITIL v3 Foundation certification; by this time, it was early September. ITIL although challenging was nothing like the PMP exam. I took a 3 day course, wrote the exam and passed; NOTE: it was not easy at all, nothing like ITIL v2 for those of you that may be ITIL v2 certified; far more difficult. So, by time I got certified in ITIL it was mid-September and this got my juices flowing and my brain was in exam/study mode. Getting my CBAP (Certified Business Analyst Professional) certification was a goal of mine for a few years, but I hate being a business analyst and I have managed projects in the past and knew this was the right path for me, so I said “that’s it, I’m doing my PMP!”. This was mid-September of this year. I did the application and everything went very smooth; I applied for exam and bam! Before I knew it, it was around Sept. 20 and I was already registered for my exam. I knew it was time to “put the pedal to the metal”. So, where to go from here? Choosing from a plethora of PMP resources, I (luckily) stumbled upon the PM PrepCast. Am I ever glad I did. I did research quite a bit all the other options, but I was convinced based upon my research that PrepCast was the best. I cannot express how glad I am to have found this product. I am sure there are other worthy products out there, but I can honestly say if it wasn’t for the PrepCast & the simulation exams, I would not have passed. So, without further ado, a very sincere deep and THANK YOU to the entire PrepCast team; yes, that includes you Cornelius you red headed PMP wizard !!!!!
Here is my secret sauce to PMP glory:
1) Purchased a hard copy of PMBOK (I do not like reading on computers or tablets)
2) Purchased the famous Rita Mulcahey PM Exam Prep book (found a used on on my local classifieds lol and it was still the most recent version in perfect condition)
3) Purchased PrepCast videos, Exam simulations (absolutely critical for PMP success) and the Formula Study Guide (overkill but gave me huge confidence in my EV formulas, project selection, etc)
4) Purchased some other formula study guide thing on Amazon; it was crap
5) Purchased a very small, compact study booklet from Amazon which I highly recommend: PMP Pocket Guide which was great for studying on the bus. Very thin, compact and full of great info
As I mentioned, I started studying by watching all the PrepCast videos. I would even listen to them in my car and at the gym on the treadmill. Watching all the videos gave me a good idea as to the scope of information I needed to digest to pass the exam. That took me a solid month. Thank god I was not working. I spent an average of 3-4 hours per day watching videos. Once I was done, I bought the simulation exams and started doing them. By this time, was early November (or late October, don’t remember). My exam scores were as follows:
PMP Exam 1 70%
PMP Exam 2 75.5%
PMP Exam 3 81.5%
PMP Exam 4 78%
PMP Exam 5 76.5%
PMP Exam 6 77%
PMP Exam 7 80%
PMP Exam 8 0% (no time)
PMP Exam 9 (ITTO) 74.5%
Timed & Learning Quizzes 80%
My real exam results were:
Initiation: Moderately Proficient
Planning: Moderately Proficient
Executing: Proficient
Monitoring & Controlling: Moderately Proficient
Closing: Moderately Proficient
As you can see, I did not do great lol. The PrepCast simulation exams I feel were absolutely critical in training my brain to work under pressure and practice very tricky questions.
Now, here is how the real exam was. Overall, I did not find the questions nearly as wordy as many people talk about. I found the questions on Prepcast to be FAR WORDIER than the real exam. I also had barely any EV formula questions. The ones I got were ridiculously easy. When I started the exam, I quickly breezed through the first 50 questions. I managed to do 50 questions in about 30 minutes. This is where the exam got really weird. All of a sudden the questions were extremely difficult. I marked so many questions I did not have enough time to review them all. I also changed a bunch of answers after reviewing them. I finished the exam (1st pass) at 3 hours and 30 minutes. I did take one break for washroom, drink liquids and eat a power barl; that probably took about 7 minutes. I found the level of trickiness and difficulty to be even worse/harder than the PrepCast questions. I don’t mean to scare you, it’s my honest opinion. There are many, many questions that had more than one VERY GOOD answer; yet you had to pick “the best one”. Almost every single question was structured like this: Blah blah blah WHAT DO YOU DO NEXT. I would love to give you some examples but do not want to breach my code of ethics I used every single minute I had left to review my questions that I had marked, and I marked so many (not a good feeling) that I did not have time to review them all. When my 4 hours finished, I did the survey; by then I was sweating, dehydrated and literally shaking (not kidding, extremely stressful). I clicked END EXAM and preyed. Saw the results and I almost collapsed from joy/stress/exhilaration. It was an incredible feeling. I wish all you aspirants the best of luck. All I can say is PrepCast RULES and I will be sure to recommend it to any PMP aspirants. Thank you Cornelius and the PrepCast team so much, I cannot express my gratitude for such an outstanding product. Cheers from Ottawa, Canada.
Kelly Coughlin, PMP
Hope you recovered from your shoulder's injury.
