Tutorial

Updated May 2022 with new PMP audit process. There are lots of very subtle things in a PMP application that can cause the PMI reviewer to arbitrarily decide the application doesn’t meet their requirements. PMI obviously won’t tell you what these things are, but the most common concern I see is wording that makes the PMI reviewer arbitrarily decide the project should be classified as non-qualifying “operations” rather than a qualifying professional project.

Here is what you need to know for getting your PMP application certification quickly: 1. Submit a PMP application on certification.pmi.org to have your PM experience and education approved. Be very careful to avoid…

According to PMI’s PMP handbook, you should list your projects individually. The problem is, most applications I’ve seen that have more than 7 projects were rejected. So what’s going on here? To answer that question, you need to understand that the application approval process is actually very subjective…

If you are a self-employed project manager (PM), it can be harder to get your PMP approved for two main reasons: 1) Self-employed PMs tend to have many short projects that they’ve done for a large number of clients, and 2) You don’t have a manager to put down as a project contact (someone who can verify your project experience). To fix this, read my post on why short projects are a problem for the PMP application and what to do about it…

Update: The new PMP application no longer requires you to list your hours on the application, although you still need to report the number of months for each project on your application. You can calculate your estimated months and hours using the manual process below or our free online FastPMP Non-overlapping Months Calculator. Using this tool is fast and free and you will also get warnings and tips based on the information you enter so you can avoid problems with your PMP application. But if you really want to manually calculate your hours for the PMP application, you should…