Maintaining my Credential

I decided to use my existing blog to address maintaining my credential.  I hope to make this more than just a travelog of my misadventures, and hopefully offer some helpful tips.  I am also going to try and keep my entries short - I do tend to ramble, sometimes.

Before my wife and I decided to move out of California, I had attended a "Train the Trainer" class offered by my local chapter of PMI.  The class and PDU's were free, on the condition that I then volunteer to teach the PMP Prep class offered by said chapter, earning even more free PDUs.  This was one of the harder things to give up - doing this for three years would have taken care of most of the PDUs needed.  I even gave up the PDUs from the original class because I could not keep my commitment.  Sigh.  Time to get creative.

Okay, not time for creativity, yet.  I'll start with some suggestions re: how I will get PDUs and how I would if I were still in California.

Getting one PDU at a time is easy.  If your local PMI chapter has lunch or dinner events, GO.  You get a PDU, dinner, and networking with other professionals in similar or related fields.  If you can convince your company to pay for the events, even better.

Here, in Utah, we have lunchtime events.  I like these for the reasons listed above, but also because I can go during the day.  Night-time events are more challenging for my schedule.

In California there were dinner events, which I was never able to make it to.  Our local chapter also had breakfast roundtables where, for the price of breakfast, we were able to break into groups and discuss 2-3 issues that people at the table were dealing with for an hour.  It was a great way to network and learn more about other PM's experiences.  I am tempted to suggest starting these here in Utah.

Another way to get an easy PDU, usually for free, is to participate in webinars.  A lot of companies offer them.  They generally take 45 minutes to an hour, during the day, and they are free.  They are often offered by vendors, so there is sometimes a little salespitch at the end, but the better webinars focus more on project management tools and/or processes than on trying to sell you on their particular tools or services.

I'll see if I can come up with some more creative ways to earn PDUs in my next post, and I'll be more specific, if I can, so that you too can take advantage of the opportunity if it is something offered by a third party.