Hello everyone, especially PgMP aspirants.

First of all, I would really like to thank to my coach Kailash Upadhyay and his team in AddonSkills for their amazing coaching process along this journey.

Please find over the next lines some lessons learnt (LL) on my way to the PgMP certification. I really hope it will be valuable for your own preparation. Needless to say, everyone has could make their own plans based on their own understanding.

Before starting: PgMP Application and Panel Expert Review.
It took me about a month and a half to get the approval from the PMI without being audit. I don’t really know why some people’s applications could be approved sooner and other even later. Anyway, the PMI says this process can take up to 30 days each stage (Application Approval and Panel Expert Review) to be completed, that is a maximum of 60 days. However, the most important LL is to continuing with your preparation plan while the PMI is reviewing it, for instance: performing tests, reading ECO tasks and SPM V4 and so on.

Study Plan, Materials and Approach 
Having a Plan is very important during this process. You obviously need a plan, follow it and adapt your actions to it.

My plan was simple:

1)     Set a goal: archiving the PgMP certification before august 2018 (I started in middle May).

-     LL: my first goal was to get the certification by early July. I did it in late July. It is not that bad. The important thing here is to focus and work toward a clear goal.

2)     Training: I took the official training of AddonSkills and the coaching of Kailash Upadhyay. I think this is a very important point.

-     LL: Would it be possible without professional coaching? I am afraid, it would. However, I am SURE it would have been much harder and it wold have taken me longer.

3)     Application and Panel Review preparation: the professional coaching was even more important on this point. When you apply to this certification it is supposed you have a broad experienced. However, you have to show it such as the PMI expects it to do it.

-     LL: Let yourself be coached. Again, I really appreciate it the Kailash coaching and AddonSkills support.

4)     Question Bank and Mock tests: I performed a lot of questions and answers. The question bank of AddonSkills is quite broad and it was quiet helpful to identify my gaps from the reading and to clarify some concepts.

‒     LL: It is really tempting to think the more, the better. I have no the same viewpoint here. I think it is better to focus on the most scenario based questions because the exam has this questions style. Another LL, understand the concept behind the questions, that is the key factor. In my case, as I said before the AddonSkills question bank came in handy to understand the reason for why I failed any questions and that make me clear up the concepts.

5)     Networking, WhatsApp’s group: Networking was another key success factor, after finishing the official training in AddonSkills I joined the global WhatsApp’s group with people that share your same objective and that allows you intact each other to make the most of everyone.

Regarding the materials and approach, I only needed the SPM V4, ECO tasks and AddonSkills student material. Keep it simple that is good enough.

I want to make a special mention to the ECO tasks. At first, it was hard to me understand the importance of this material for the exam. It is better to say, how ECO tasks match with SPM V4 and their sequence (I struggled to understand the “right” sequence of the tasks in closing, initiation and strategic domain, and so on). My LL in this point probably are quite simple:

‒       ECO contains tasks that are supposed to be done only by the Program Manager. That does not mean they are all the tasks in the respective domain and all of them have to be done either.

‒       Regarding the order, I would say do not struggle with this topic too much (I know I just said I did it) because programs are very dynamic and many things happen concurrently and there are some cyclical processes (for example, planning due to the progressive elaboration).

‒       I would focus on understanding What the task is trying to perform, How you should perform it according to PMI point of view and Why you have to perform it.

‒       Finally, be smart. For instance, closing represent only 3% of the exam that is about 5 questions out of 170. Is it really worth to spend a lot of time trying to understand the “right” order? Finally, the common sense is a powerful tool. You cannot close a program without getting approval from the governance and they cannot give you that green light without performing a final assessment before, can’t you/they?

The exam
Concerning the exam itself, just saying that I am PMP and PMI-ACP so that I knew in advanced the type of questions (scenario based questions) that the PMI usually uses to measure in these kinds of certification exams.

Having said that, I have to say that I found it much harder than I expected it.

‒       The exam duration was really tight. I had to hurry for the last 35 questions.

‒       I found the questions very long (about 70% of the questions were very long)

‒       I only recognized abut 5-10 questions that were very similar to those I found on my question bank.

‒       There were about 15-20 questions, I would say the shortest and more straight forward ones that asked for artifacts, phases or ECO tasks.

An important point here, non-English language natives like me can notice the stress to face an exam with very long questions for 4 hours. Especially because details are quite important on the exam and can make you choose an option rather than other, for instance: the verb 'empower' (an option was something like “Empower the person listed in stakeholder register to contact his/her stakeholder”), “empower” or just “ask/tell her/him to contact someone.

Finally, I like to share that I got Target in Strategic Domain, Program Life Cycle and Stakeholders Engagement. Above target in Benefits Management and Below Target in Governance Domain. With these combination I got an overall score of Target. I was told before the exam that the PMI had changed the weight each question has on the overall score so that there will be questions that are worth less than other (keep it mind).

Thanks

William Guevara