PMP (Project Management Professional) is definitely the best Project Management qualification to have, if you’re going to have a qualification at all. For bigger PM jobs it can be a required standard before you can get the interview, and for any PM job it’s a great door opener. Experience counts for a lot too (quite rightly) but experience AND PMP is the magic combination.
However it’s not easy to get PMP. There are three things you need:
- Proof of a few years of PM experience
- Proof of 30 hours of training/education
- Pass a difficult exam – 200 questions in 4 hours
The experience is easier than it sounds because anyone interested in PM will have been working on projects for a few years – though my tip is to start documenting everything project-related FROM NOW ON/ so you can easily prove it. Backdating the proof is more difficult.
The 30 hours is nothing – just a few days of training, you can easily do that. Even reading counts, if you can show some notes and lessons learned from the books you’ve read.
But the exam…. Holy moly it’s a tough one!

My message is: however experienced and great you are as a project manager, you will NEVER pass the exam if you just turn up and rely on your real world knowledge. You HAVE to do some “exam prep”. You have to look at example questions and learn the lingo, learn what they are looking for. Like a driving test as little to do with real life driving, you just need to know what they want to see and hear from you. Often they want to hear textbook answers that nobody would actually do in real life – but you have to play their game.
I do think that experience and understanding the theory of PM are vital before you even start this exam prep. If you understand things like critical paths and float and CPI and SPI then learning how PMP asks its questions about those is just the final layer, it’s not too bad to learn. Otherwise you will be just learning A LOT of words that you don’t understand, like a parrot – an almost impossible task.
They are cagey about the passmark but it seems to be about 80% – so there’s not much room for error, and NO room for guessing!
This exam prep can be from a book, a phone app, or a video course. On line courses can be either from PMI official approved partners (expensive) or just from somewhere like udemy – I would recommend this course on udemy – he has 97,000 five star reviews, and it only costs $15.
https://www.udemy.com/course/pmp-pmbok6-35-pdus/

In case you’re still resisting whether you NEED exam prep, let me tell you that I tried some sample questions (you can download them for free from the internet, just google “PMP sample exam questions”) and got nearly all of them wrong. I like to think that I know quite a bit about PM, I’ve written books and online courses about it, but I didn’t know PMI’s terminology and didn’t know how “theoretically correct vs real world practical” they wanted the answers to be. This would be easily learnable, but not guessable.
Here are some of the questions for you to test yourself on!

I got this wrong as you can see, foolishly confusing ‘managing quality’ with ‘controlling quality’. Do YOU know the difference??

Next question:

My mistake was to focus on the key stakeholders rather than trying to satisfy all of them.

Next is a question where it hard to even understand the question let alone answer it:

Is your brain fried yet? Remember that in the PMP exam you will have to answer TWO HUNDRED of these questions in 4 hours, that’s about one per minute.
And if you get less than about 89% you fail and have to retake it, and you have to PAY again too!!

Let’s do another:

I know about control charts, but I don’t know about the terminology that they like to use. Guessing that one would be a 25% chance.

Here’s a softer, more people-based question

They ALL seem like reasonable options to me, based on real life. But I suspect that C will be the right answer since it is the most politically correct.

PMP goes into Finance as well. Try this one:

What did you reckon? I guessed D but actually the right answer is A. Who would have thought it? Clearly the only way to get through this is to learn the names for everything. A pain, but can be done. Guessing is never going to work!!

Here’s another one I got wrong

We all know we would do B and then D, but the textbook answer is to backtrack and do A. I can see that now – we all know that the project has to be defined before you can plan it. But the wording of the question implied that sponsor knows what they want and they are asking for a plan. But now, if I saw that question again, it would be easy to get right.

So there you are, sorry if I’ve put you off getting your PMP. I am so full of respect for people that DO have PMP. They have years of experience AND they have passed this horrible exam.
They really do deserve all the benefits of their PMP qualification!
How to get PMP: all the information is here.

100% Agree with this. I shelled out for the Study Hall 3-month subscription. It has learning modules, but most importantly practice questions, that say why the answers are correct and the other answers are incorrect. It also includes flash cards, games to play to get the correct answers, and a few full practice exams. It was really worth it to get a full understanding of what answers they are looking for, and how they are nuances.
On the exam there were several questions (more than half) I wouldn’t have been able to answer without this specific prep despite doing 4 project management courses + experience, and a fair few I still questioned with it because they all seemed reasonable.
I can’t see someone passing without the question specific prep.
I am studying for the CAPM and I understand the material and a lot of the language but even then, I’ve failed two practice tests because the way questions are worded are tricky. Also the answers are very tricky. Usually two answers are essentially the same but worded slightly differently and then you really do just have to guess because either seems correct. It’s very frustrating.
Note that not all questions available online for training is suitable for preparing for passing the PMP exam. The PMBOK guide is updated every now and then. So, be sure that questions you are training on is targeting the latest version of that reference.
For example, the questions above are based on sixth version while the latest version is 7.
Yes indeed, for your actual training you do need to get the latest questions. For this article I don’t think it matters though, it just shows the type of questions and how tricky they are.