« Lacking Commitment
Successfully Interviewing Your Project Customer and Gathering Project Requirements - Part X - Model of Interview Questions »

PMP Exam Eligibility

December 22, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Certification, PMP

PMP Exam Eligibility
By Ray W. Frohnhoefer

With this being a short workweek and the need for my attention on rewriting one of my class lecture sets for online delivery, I thought this might be a good week to have a short discussion on PMP Exam eligibility. In fact, I’ll post a synopsis of this with every PMP Challenge Question. I see a need to address this since I’ve been asked several times recently and also found people were searching this blog for the information.

The requirements are really quite simple:

  • Have 35 hours of Project Management training. For those who have learned “on the job”, many PMI Chapters offer PMP Exam review classes which have at least 35 contact hours to help you meet this criteria.
  • With a Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent: Have a minimum three years’ professional project management experience, during which 4,500 hours are spent leading and directing project tasks, within an 8-year period.
  • Without a Bachelor’s Degree, the hours are increased to 7,500.

Perhaps more daunting than the exam itself is the application. You will have to create a detailed resume showing the experience project-by-project. Each entry requires a reference contact. In general, the steps to take are:

  1. Join PMI and your local PMI Chapter (this will save you money and provide important resources for assistance).
  2. Fill out the detailed online application and pay the (reduced for member) fees.
  3. Take the 200 question multiple choice test at a Prometric testing center.

You will know your status as soon as you pass the exam and upon passing will automatically be added to the online registry of PMPs. Prospective employers and clients have access to this registry to verify your certification.

Ray W. Frohnhoefer, MBA, PMP is the Director of the Project Support Office at EDmin as well as a consultant, speaker, writer, educator, and mentor on Project Management. Ray is also the Component Mentor for PMI Region 7 (Southwest North America), a Past President of PMI, San Diego Chapter, Inc., and an adjunct faculty member at three San Diego universities. You can find out more about his professional roles at http://www.edmin.com/company/index.cfm?function=showBioDetail&id=80 and through his blog, Tales from the Project Notebook, at http://projectnotebook.blogspot.com.

Share this article:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • blogmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Yahoo! Buzz

Related Articles

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 and is filed under Certification, PMP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 people have left comments

Again and again, we see that companies do not allow a candidate to manage a project without PMP certification. You emphasize that one is not eligible to take the examination without project management experience. Something must be allowed to come first. What helpful thing can you say about this?

Brian P. Branagan wrote on October 4, 2008 - 10:53 am | Visit Link

While its true in the past, you only had to work on projects, the September 2008 PMI PMP Certification Handbook now states:

The PMP Role Delineation states that candidates for the PMP credential:
• Perform their duties under general supervision and are responsible for all aspects of the project
for the life of the project
• Lead and direct cross-functional teams to deliver projects within the constraints of schedule,
budget, and scope
• Demonstrate sufficient knowledge and experience to appropriately apply a methodology to
projects that have reasonably well-defined project requirements and deliverables

The key phrase here is “under general supervision”. When I first became a Project Manager 25 years ago, my manager, himself an experienced Project Manager who moved into a management slot supervised my efforts. Such on the job training is the best route to take to gain the needed experience. Smart companies create internships and mentoring opportunities.

One way to convince your manager you are ready for such an “apprenticeship” would be to earn the CAPM - Certified Associate Project Manager first.

While its an unfortunate truth, there are also still companies which create the “knighted” Project Manager — you get a copy of the MS Project documentation (if you’re lucky!) and are told to “go forth and manage”.

Either way, you can still earn the necessary experience, even though just working on projects isn’t any longer sufficient.

Ray Frohnhoefer wrote on October 4, 2008 - 12:15 pm | Visit Link

What is the basic eligiblity createria for post gradute student. Because i am MBA (Operation) & have technical background ie BE (computers) and i want to do PMP so can any one help me.

Rakesh wrote on November 20, 2008 - 6:38 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories