Capm Certification Study Material Pdf

[Roxanna Fitting]

Ifit's not your first time on my blog, you might be thinking: "Aren't you a prominent software developer, not a project manager?" Ok, maybe without the prominent part. But yes, you are right. I started working as a developer a few years ago. And I enjoyed writing code. What I didn't enjoy was: the impossible deadlines, incomplete or changing requirements, and "let's go around the table" meetings. It always felt like a waste of time. All I wanted to do was to get a list of features and start coding. In the beginning, I associated those time-wasting activities with "project management". Thus, project management was a waste of time. Over the years, my perception has changed. I worked under good project managers and some less good ones and I've started noticing the difference. I've learned that a good project manager is not a "boss". He or she is a facilitator. Good PM (project manager) helps the team do their jobs, not hinders them by expecting the impossible results. So at some point, I decided that I want to learn the magic behind good project management.

A great opportunity for it came when I was switching jobs. My company had a policy to pay for one training to make the job transition easier. Since I felt that having a PMI certification (Project Management Institute is a global organization providing training and certifications in project management) would be much more helpful than doing a yet another software training, I've decided to go for it.

If you are a project manager or if you ever wanted to become one and checked the most recognized certifications, you probably know that the Project Management Institute is most well known for their Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. It's the most recognized one and it's pretty much the standard certificate that most project managers would take. The other certifications that they have, focus more on specific areas like "PMI Scheduling Professional" or "PMI Risk Management Professional". So I joined a PMP training workshop.

On the first day, I learned that it's now enough to have the necessary knowledge to pass the exam. PMP certification requires you to have 35 hours of project management education (which is relatively easy to get - you just take a course) and documented experience of leading projects (not so easy to get). People with a four-year degree (after a university) need to have 4500 hours of experience, which translated to roughly 2,5 years of doing project management work. If you don't have a four-year degree, but only a high school diploma, you need 7500 hours!

That was a problem because I could scrape together only around 1 year of experience (and those were rather small projects). So that was a bummer. Luckily, there was another certification that I could take. It's called Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) and it requires a secondary diploma (high school will do) plus 23 hours of project management education. Which was perfect for me, because the workshop that I was taking had 35 hours. So I took the workshop, got the PMP preparation materials (the "PMBOK Guide" and "PMP Exam Prep") and I was ready to take the exam after a bit more self-study.

One year later I started my preparation. And I realized that I forgot almost everything that I learned before. But the workshop did a great job of explaining all the concepts, so when I was reading the materials, I was recognizing things that we talked about. Learning from PMP materials instead of the dedicated CAPM ones might feel like overkill (since the PMP is harder than CAPM), but in the end, it worked very well for me. Plus, if I decide to take the PMP exam in the future, I won't have to learn from scratch.

It took me a lot of time to prepare. Much more than I anticipated. I guess I was bad at Developing the schedule ? (a project management joke). I initially assumed that 2 weeks off from work will be enough to get ready. I ended up spending 136 hours preparing for the exam (plus some more time when I was reviewing the flashcards). I quickly realized that it was hard for me to spend the whole day studying. So I took a different approach - every day I was starting with 2-3 hours of studying in the morning and then, when I got tired, I moved on to doing different things.

I first read the PMBOK. I was taking notes along the way - I wrote down the Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs of each process (often called ITTOs) together with all the important information. Then, I started reading Rita's book (the "PMP Exam Prep" is called "Rita's book" because of the author's name) and doing the test exams at the same time. The company that organized the workshop has an e-learning platform where I could take the "test exams" (which turned out to be quite different than the real exam - more on that later). After finishing both books and doing test exams a few more times, I was reviewing my notes and the flashcards with ITTOs, and waiting for the exam.

I thought that I don't need to schedule the exam that much in advance. I was wrong. At the beginning of September, I finally decided to pay for the exam and schedule it ("I think I will be ready for the next week") only to find out that the next available date was in the middle of October in the exam center 80 km away from me. I could that the exam online (it's possible for CAPM but not for PMP), but the restrictions are quite strict. You need to find a room where you can't reach anything around you (which means that I would be doing the exam in the middle of the living room) and if the internet connection goes down, the exam is invalid. I didn't want to risk losing $300 over a connection hiccup and since taking the exam at the exam center didn't cost anything extra, I decided to wait. This bought me a bit more time to prepare.

On the day of the exam, I drove to the examination center, took the exam and passed it. In 12 out of 13 areas (like "Project Environment", "Project Scope Management", "Project Risk Management", etc.) I got "Above Target" results and in 1 I got "Target". Which is a quite good score, so I guess my method of preparation worked well. So what advice I would give to my younger (by half a year) self or someone who wants to take this exam as well?

If you don't know an answer to a question, select B - it has the biggest chance to be correct, based on the statistics of the exam questions. No, just kidding - DON'T DO THAT! There are no easy tricks for the exam. No answer is selected more often than others. The "longest answer" is not always the correct one. But there are a few things that will help you prepare better for the exam.

You might be wondering whether it's better to buy "Rita's book" or the "PMBOK Guide". I got both of them as part of my training. Since I took the PMP preparation workshop, I got the "PMP Exam Prep" instead of the "CAPM Exam Prep", but I decided to stick to it, as I assumed that "PMP Prep" would be an extended version of "CAPM Prep". Rita's book is really good in terms of preparing you for the exam. It's written for people planning to take the exam, so there are a lot of hints and remarks about what is especially important to know. It complements the guidebook very well and fills a lot of gaps. For example, in the PMBOK I read that there are PMOs - the Project Management Offices that help project managers do their job. But only in Rita's book, I learned that there are three different approaches to how they work. And each of them has a different name. Something that I think is worth knowing for the exam. Rita's book was helpful especially with the parts "around" the project management, so not the processes themselves, but everything else. The PMBOK mentions different types of organizations (and it even has a table of them), but Rita's book actually explains what is the difference between strong, week and balanced matrix (plus, its explanation is very easy to understand and will stick with me for a long time). Finally, some terms are just mentioned in PMBOK, like the "Designs of Experiments". The only thing that I knew about it after reading that book, was that it exists in this and this process and that's it. I had no idea how it works. And even if I was never asked about it at the exam, I would like to know what I'm reading about. Rita's book explained that term and showed some examples. Definitely worth getting it!

There are a lot of exercises in Rita's book. Some of them are pretty straightforward: "Select the project lifecycle phase to which a given sentence applies" or "Select true/false". But many will require you to do some thinking and to write down lists of ideas. I skipped a lot of exercises. I did only the easy ones and skipped the "write down" ones, as I wanted to go through the book as fast as possible (before I knew that I will be waiting 1 month for the exam). But if you are struggling with some concepts, exercises can help you a lot.

If you were to buy only one book (they each cost $100) I would say - go for Rita's book. You can understand the Project Management processes based just on this one, plus it will help you prepare for the exam. And preparing for the exam is probably the main reason why you are buying those books. Unless you like to casually read 600-page-long project management books.

The PMBOK is very dry. It talks about a lot of topics, but it's missing a lot of small details that you will need to know about at the exam. It also doesn't talk much about how to behave in real-world scenarios. This is where taking a course can help you. Having someone who explains each process and shows you examples makes it easier to understand and remember.

Taking an in-person workshop can be very expensive. I probably wouldn't do it if I had to pay for it myself unless I knew for sure that I would need this certificate. But there are also video courses, like those at Udemy that are on sale most of the time. Buying one of those is a good idea, especially since some of them will qualify as the required 25 hours of official training. I didn't take any Project Management courses at Udemy, but I took some others (like the "AWS Solution Architect") and they offer a very good value for money during the sales. $10 for a 20-hours long course that someone keeps updating regularly (to keep getting good reviews) is a good deal.

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