Dear Gail Freedman,

Congratulations on passing your PMP exam!

Thank you for sharing your success and posting your lessons learned.

Good luck in all your future endeavors.

I am a Project Manager with 20 years of experience in project work in health insurance. I failed the first time I took the exam. With demanding work projects, a family, and a torn right shoulder that could not have surgery, studying was challenging and painful. The bulk of my study time with questions and exams was on weekends, in between parenting, and reading or review was at night in between physical therapy appointments and work. It took approximately 6 months to prepare.

Biggest challenges:

The most difficult part of preparing for me was comprehending all the different tools identified by PMI that I had never seen or used in practice. I used google a lot to see examples of these tools used in practice. Once I understood these better, I could see how having these tools would have helped past projects tremendously! The reading alone was not enough. Having someone to teach me how to think of the material differently was key. Dan Ryan was a huge help!

Tools
• PMBOK, 5th edition
• Andy Crowe, PMP – The PMP Exam: How To Pass On Your First Try. 5th edition
• Podcasts: The PM-Study Coach with Cornelius Fichtner, PMP
• PMP® Exam Coaching with Dan Ryan, PMP
• PM Exam Simulator
• Blog: Shiv from PMESN blog


What helped?
• Table 3-1: Project Management Process Group and Knowledge Area Mapping, p. 61 of the PMBOK. Try your best to write this out by memory. Practice daily.
• ITTOs & Formulas: Try your best to memorize
• After reading the materials, take a full practice exam and see how you do. This will give valuable insight into where you may need to spend more time.
• The PM Exam simulator has 9 practice exams. Take each exam until you can pass it before moving onto the next one. Each exam is 4 hours and post exam review is 2-6 hours. I spent upwards of 170 hours answering questions and more time reviewing the answers.
• Take half-days off at work as vacation days to do practice exams
• Get enough sleep every night. Skipping sleep caused me to forget what I was learning.
• Daily walking

Pre-Exam:

I was not consistently scoring in the 80s on the mock exam and nearly cancelled my exam date. However I did take over 16 practice exams. I practices using 3.5 hours of the exam for questions, and the last half hour for review.

Exam Day:

Make sure you’re comfortable with the trip over to the testing site. The day of the exam will be nerve wracking. The room is very cold. I had to wait 30 minutes before being allowed into the testing seat. I did not use the noise cancellation phones because the pressure of these give me a headache. The paper provided was tinted blue and writing with the supplied pencil made my writing unreadable. I was very glad I spent a great deal of time practicing and did not need to rely on a “brain dump”.

Good luck! Believe in the process and the practice and learning quizzes and exams.

Gail Freedman, PMP