Complete PMP Exam Prep: 35 Contact Hours/PDUs & PMBOK 8

You will finish this course ready to sit the PMP exam.

Not ready to recite definitions, and not ready to recognize terminology on a flashcard. Ready to read a project situation you have never seen before, work out what it is really asking, and choose the response a capable project manager would actually take. That is what the exam tests now, and that is what this course is built to give you.

Along the way you will earn the 35 hours of formal training that PMI requires before you can apply, and you will take the end-of-course assessment that PMI expects a self-paced course to include.

Why this course is different

Most PMP courses on the market were built for an earlier version of the exam and updated afterwards. A section gets rewritten, some new terminology gets dropped in, and the rest carries on as it was.

This one was not retrofitted. Every lesson covering the Exam Content Outline was newly recorded for the exam as it stands today, one lesson per task, with the PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition running through it.

That matters more than it used to. Sixty percent of your exam now sits in adaptive and hybrid territory rather than predictive, and a course that treats agile as an appendix will leave you underprepared for more than half of what you will face.

It is also not a classroom seminar with a camera pointed at it. Every lesson was written and recorded for online study, which is a different job entirely.

How the exam actually asks its questions

The modern PMP exam rarely asks you what something is. It drops you into a situation and asks what you would do about it.

• Should you act now, or investigate first?

• Collaborate with the team, or escalate to your sponsor?

• Protect the baseline, or process a change request?

• Coach the person, or make the decision yourself?

• Apply a predictive mechanism here, or an adaptive one?

• Deal with the symptom in front of you, or go after the cause underneath it?

Questions like these are the reason so many experienced project managers walk out of the exam surprised. Two answers look defensible, sometimes three, and knowing the definitions does not help you choose between them. What helps is recognizing the signal in the scenario and knowing which response the exam is actually rewarding.

Every domain in this course closes with a set of applied exam scenarios where you do exactly that. You read the situation, you choose your answer, and then we work through the reasoning together, including the wrong-answer patterns that catch people out most often.

What you will study

The course follows the Exam Content Outline directly: three domains, twenty-six tasks, and every enabler underneath them, with one lesson per task so you can always see which part of the exam you are working on.

• People. Building a shared vision, managing conflict, leading a project team, engaging stakeholders, aligning and managing their expectations, transferring knowledge, and planning communication that produces shared understanding rather than more email.

• Process. Integrated planning, scope, value-based delivery, resources, procurement, project finance including earned value, quality, scheduling and network diagrams, evaluating project status from artifacts and metrics, and closing a project properly.

• Business Environment. Governance, compliance, change control, removing impediments, managing issues and risk, continuous improvement, supporting organizational change, and responding when the world outside your project moves.

Before any of that, you will cover what everything else depends on: how the Exam Content Outline is structured, the PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition, and the mindset the exam expects you to bring.

About the PMBOK Guide

The PMP exam is not a test of the PMBOK Guide. I say that a lot, because most candidates arrive believing the opposite and then study the wrong way for weeks.

The Guide still matters, so a full section of this course is given over to the Eighth Edition. It opens with my interview with Jesse Fewell, who chaired the PMBOK 8 development effort, on what changed and why, including the new definitions of project and project management. From there we work through the principles and the performance domains with a single question in front of us: how does this show up inside an exam question, and how do you recognize an answer that applies the right action to the wrong domain?

You will need your own copy of the Guide. PMI members download it free as a membership benefit, and membership costs less than the discount it earns you on the exam fee.

Your 35 hours, your assessment, and your certificate

PMI requires 35 hours of formal project management training before you can apply for the exam.

Self-paced on-demand training counts towards that requirement, provided the course includes an end-of-course assessment. Plenty of self-paced courses do not have one.

This one does. It is a fifty-question assessment covering all three domains, and you need seventy-five percent to pass. There is also a short self-assessment right at the beginning, before you have studied anything, so you can see where you are starting from and measure the difference later.

When you finish the lessons, Udemy issues your Certificate of Completion. It shows your name, the course title, the date, and the 35+ hours of training you completed. That is the document you need for your PMI application.

Everything that comes with it

• Over 35 hours of video lessons covering every task in the Exam Content Outline, with closed captions throughout.

• The PM StudyCoach Guidebook, a complete twelve-week study plan with reflection questions and a checklist for every week, so you always know what to study next.

• The PMP Exam Formula Study Guide, covering every calculation the exam can put in front of you and, more usefully, what each result means once you have it. Earned value, network diagrams, and the interpretation questions that have largely replaced pure calculation.

• The eBook The 50 PMP Exam Prep Questions Everyone Gets Wrong, fifty of the hardest questions I have, each with a full explanation of why the right answer is right and why the other three are not.

• A 20-question pre-course self-assessment to establish your starting point.

• The 50-question end-of-course assessment, which PMI requires from a self-paced course like this one.

Studying around a real job

This course was built for people who cannot take a week off to sit in a classroom. You can work through it around your job, your projects and your family, at whatever pace suits your exam date.

If you want structure, the twelve-week plan gives you a schedule to follow. If you would rather move faster or slower, nothing here stops you.

You do not need any prior PMP study to begin. Some genuine project experience helps, because this is exam preparation rather than an introduction to project management, but every term is explained as it appears.

Who is teaching you

I am Cornelius Fichtner, PMP. I have been a project manager since 1989, working in Switzerland, Germany and the United States, and I have spent nearly twenty years teaching PMP candidates in front of a microphone and a camera rather than in a classroom.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Recorded teaching is its own craft. You cannot read the room, you cannot slow down when a face goes blank, and you cannot rescue a muddled explanation with a follow-up question. Everything has to be clear the first time. Two decades of doing it is why these lessons sound like someone talking to you rather than someone presenting at you.

Since 2005 I have also hosted The Project Management Podcast, where I have recorded more than five hundred interviews with project managers, authors, standards chairs and practitioners around the world.

All of which is a long way of saying that I have spent a very long time listening to project managers describe what happens on projects, and to candidates describe what happens in the exam room. Both conversations shaped this course, and I created and recorded every lesson in it myself.

What you will walk away with

Knowledge of the material, obviously. Every domain, every task, predictive and adaptive and hybrid, and how the choice between them changes what a project manager should do.

But more than that, a method for reading a scenario question, spotting what it is really testing, throwing out the answers that look right but are not, and choosing the one that reflects how the exam expects a project manager to think.

That is the difference between studying project management and preparing for the PMP exam.

Let us get to work.