PMP Certification Requirements

PMP Certification Requirements
By PM Hut

The PMP Certification Requirements has to do with the following:

1. Your educational background
2. Your past Project Management experience
3. Your formal Project Management education

We’ll start by the last one, as it is a constant. Simply put, you need to have 35 contact hours of formal Project Management education (note: a contact hour is not the same thing as a PDU). In short, contact hours can be earned by having a formal Project Management training in any of the below:

• Universities/Colleges
• Distance-learning companies
• Training companies
• Company-sponsored programs

Now since the required Project Management experience is dependent on your educational background, here’s an explanatory table:

Educational Background	Past Project Management Experience
High School Diploma or equivalent	7,500 hours of Project Management experience in the span of 60 non-overlapping1 months.
University Degree or equivalent	4,500 hours of Project Management experience in the span of 36 non-overlapping months.

The Project Management experience can be gathered by working in any of the Project Management subsets (such as project risk management, project scheduling, project communications management, etc…).

Note that all submitted information can audited at PMI’s discretion.

As you can see, the PMP Certification Requirements are not hard to possess in case you have the necessary experience, so why wait?

¹ None-overlapping, in this context, means that if for a certain month you have worked on more than one project, then this month still counts as 1 (not 2 or more).

© 2009 PM Hut – The Project Management Hut