Getting the Boot: A Training Option

Following 20 years at a large Canadian telecommunications firm, Bruce established the project management consulting firm Solutions Management Inc (SMI). Since 1999, he has provided contract project/program management services, been a source for project management support personnel and created/delivered courses to over 7,000 participants in Canada, the United States and England.

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Let’s cut straight to the chase. You want to complete your CAPM or PMP certification as quickly as possible; maybe even in the next three months. You’ve looked at the certification requirement at the PMI website and you know that you need 35 hours of project management training as part of the prerequisite for the PMP exam (along with 4,500 or 7,500 hours of experience).

To qualify to write the CAPM exam, you don’t even need experience! The bare minimum requirement is 23 hour of training, and that can easily be achieved. You do some research and find a reputable training organization and decide you are going to fast track the whole process and just do a PMP bootcamp. Five hard days later, you will have 35 hours of training and you will be ready to go. Right? Not so fast.

To simplify the review, let’s just focus on the PMP certification. Another article will more closely explore the CAPM. The best way to draw a conclusion is to look at two situations. Let me first explain that I’ve presented dozens of PMP bootcamps and have seen every possible scenario as far as pre-bootcamp preparation goes…

Scenario 1: The project manager that is building a broad skill set while moving toward PMP certification. A few years ago, you took a two- or three-day Introduction to Project Management course that was based on the PMI methodology. It was …

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