Congrats on passing the exam and thank you for taking the time to post your experience and lessons learned to the forum. Best of luck to you as a newly certified PMP.
i passed my PMP exam last week (first attempt)
I started learning in september using the PMP Prepcast. I covered one chapter / knowledge area per week. Normally that mean doing one podcast on weekdays and the remaining ones on the weekend.
In december I also attended a 5 day training course (my company paid for it). Because I already covered all the topics with the podcasts the course was nice to review but I felt I did not learn that much.
I think if you get a course paid by your company then that is an efficient way to prepare. But if you have to sponsor yourself the PMP podcast is the way to go.
Over Christmas I read the Rita book and did some mock exams/simulations. During the mock exams I noted down areas where I had some uncertainty answering questions. After the simulation I googled those topics. Usually I found some good explanations in blogs. I also checked the results to see which areas need improvement (it was quality and stakeholder management) and re-listened to some of the related podcasts.
I did learn the order of the processes in the planning group by heart (out of the Rita book) and this was valuable for the exam.
In retrospect I should have spent some more time learning ITTO. There were a couple of questions where this would have been needed.
Exam went ok. I knew I had some gaps (kind of followed the pareto rule for learning and accepted that I will only have 80% covered). I would have liked to take a bit more time for learning but I HAD to take the exam latest mid of January (there was a hard dependency: I had to take my exam before I was too pregnant to travel to the exam location)
Training for Project Management Professional (PMP)®, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®, and Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)®
