PMP Certification Requirements
By PM Hut
The PMP Certification Requirements has to do with the following:
- Your educational background
- Your past Project Management experience
- 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
This post is either very out of date or very misleading for a PMP candidate.
The limit for ‘project management’ experience is work in the last 8 years
The mandated requirement for ‘experience’ is the candidate is responsible for ‘directing and leading’ project activities to create a project deliverable. Work you do yourself does not count! You must be at least a team leader responsible for directing the work of others and have some measure of responsibility for the deliverable being created.
Certainly the preparation of a schedule or risk plan would count (they are deliverables) provided you are supervising someone else actually doing the work.
Hi Patrick,
I can’t see how the article is misleading or out of date.
The article, in fact, is very accurate and can easily be verified against the PMP handbook.
Thanks for your comment and for sharing.
Is it necessary to have Experience as project Manager before this course or I can attend those classes to gain the knowledge..
Cheers…