PMP Certification

With my knowledge in Project Management i tried to capture the PMP certification process.

Getting PMP certification is not a simple process. But with an exam strategy it would not be that impossible. You also need to have certain educational standards and Project Management experience. A major misconception is that Project Management experience means people think that they need to be Project Manager all along. But Project contributor experience is also valid for the certification. PMI doesn’t look for Manager title, but the real Project contribution experience is sufficient. That means a Senior Developer or Business analyst who contributed to projects are eligible for PMP certification.

Lets look into basic requirements:
35 contact hours of formal Project Management education
If you have High School Diploma:7500 hours of Project Contribution experience
If you have Bachelor’s Degree:4500 hours of Project Contribution experience

Then Steps that you need to finish to appear for the exam:
Register yourself at http://www.pmi.org
Then fill-in online application
Once PMI reviews your application and approves it, you will have 1 year to write the exam
From PMI.org you can apply for the exam. Pay the fee on pmi.org web site. Then they will send you confirmation number.
Links will take you to Prometric.com web site. Using the confirmation number you can schedule your test at a center near to you.
Appear at the Prometric center and finish the exam in 4 hours.

About the exam
PMP exam will be based on PMBOK guide 3rd edition. So need not to say 2nd version is no longer valid. Please don’t follow 2nd version books at all. There is hell lot of terminology change in 3rd edition
It will be 4 hour exam and will have 200 questions in it. Out those you will be marked only for 175. The trick part is that you will not know which are those unwanted 25 questions.

Tips to fill-in your application
PMI categorized all project management processes in to 5 groups. Those are Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring, and Closing.
When you submit your application you need to categorize your experience in to these 5 process groups.
Typically we have 2000 working hours in a year. Aproximately 500 hours in a quarter. You have spread those hours across the 5 process groups.
For example in software industry if you are a developer or lead most of the time you spend on Implementation. So Executing will occupy majority of your project. If you are a Business analyst most of the time you spend on Initiating and Planning. If you are Coordinator or Project Manager you will spend mostly on Monitoring.
You have to think about your projects and calculate hours you spend across these process groups. If you calculate those figures on working sheet, then you can fill your application with ease.
In software industry Projects roughly have 10%, 30%, 20%, 30%, 10% of division across 5 process groups. This is just rough division.