Opening Day!

PM City is now open! After more than 8 months of designing and constructing the best project management online learning experience from the ground up, PM City is now open for business!

PM City is the amazing new interactive online course development exclusively for the 6th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and the Project Management Professional PMP certification exam. PM City is a production of The Crowd Training http://www.thecrowdtraining.com/pm6 and is available at crowd.myabsorb.com for only $720 for a lifetime subscription. [Or use the coupon code thisistheyear to get the entire course for $201.80 USD]

PM City is fully online and self paced. The e-learning course fulfills the 35 hour project management requirement for the PMP application from PMI. The Project Management Institute accepts the certificate of completion from The Crowd Training’s PM City course.

PM City can be used as your complete course or as a supplement to your other in person training or self study.

Everyone learns differently. As such, not all project management courses should be presented and delivered in all the same ways. This course was envisioned to purposely shake up the project management training industry. The tired method of having PM instructors read over their dull and plain PowerPoint slides is ineffective. Recording someone stand there or sit in front of their webcam talking at you for hours is not much better. Sitting there passively while someone lectures to you for hours is not a pedagogically sound approach to teaching. And in our modern society with the advancements of technology there is no reason to force an approach that is only meaningful to a few onto the masses. That is why The Crowd Training wanted to create something effective for the masses.

As you become more engaged and active in your learning, the more it sticks. That stickiness is extremely important as you are taking a high stakes, high cost exam. There is too much on the line to spend time on training that does not match your learning style. No one wants to retake the exam at any cost. You want to pass the first time and obtain that highly valued Project Management Professional distinction. That is what I set out to make for you.

Beginning with my own study and preparation for the PMP Exam over 13 years ago, I observed how almost every training course or book out there was boring and fairly dry. It consisted primarily of someone lecturing to you for hours. In my case in particular, there were no PowerPoints or whiteboards or flipcharts of any kind. It was hours, upon hours, of someone dumping all that he knew about the PMP exam at us. After 9 – 10 hours a day of dumping information on us, there was not much sticking. Actually, I don’t think much was sticking post-lunch.

To overcome the assaulting barrage of project management talk I drew pictures, made sketches, created mind maps, took notes, and otherwise made sense of the drone of words. As a visual learner, I need to see it. A picture is worth a thousand words. And I had to make a few hundred pictures a day to keep up. Those pictures became the cornerstone of my project management training delivery for years. I still have past students to this day saying how my graphics and drawings have stuck with them years after they passed the PMP exam.

When it came time to finally have the technology to not only present my drawings to PMP learners, but to provide an online manner for learners to engage and control their learning, I was so excited to be able to offer such a product. I dedicated hours and sleep to sketch out my vision of how project management training could be. I wanted it to be accessible and on demand. I wanted online learning not to be a chore or something “they have to get through”. I wanted it to be meaningful and sticky.

After months of laying out all the neighborhoods [a.k.a. knowledge areas and concept blocks of project management] and constructing all their elements, I am proud to announce that PM City is open! It took so much effort to envision new ways of presenting the content, illustrating material, recording audio that was conversational and approachable, animating my drawings and my voice, and bringing the project management content to life. But even more than that, it required the technical capabilities to make the true control and interactivity possible. Every box clicked had to trigger some action or reaction. Voiceovers had to play only when the user wished them to play. Navigation was not to be linear, which requires more code to connect the dots and allow the learner to return to content they wish to repeat as often as they wished without needing to hunt and peek through hours of video footage.

PM City is truly an awesome new way to study and prepare for the Project Management Professional certification exam. And the best practices of learning does not stop there! To meld the best online PMP training with the tried and true success of the in person instructor led classroom, The Crowd Training is offering a series of “Power Prep PMP Weekend” classes. These weekend PMP training sessions augment the online learning content. By combining the advantages of both the online training and the off line face-to-face training, you get the best of both worlds. Best of all, you don’t have to take away any time from work. The online learning is done on demand and on your time and choosing. The in person classroom is only one weekend! A condensed, powerful weekend to meet with instructors and fellow PMP candidates to ask questions, take practice mock exams, and extend your learning.

These Power Prep courses are scheduled in select cities throughout the United States in 2018 starting with San Diego the weekend of March 17 – 18, 2018. Here the link to hold your spot AND get full access to the awesome online PMP prep content: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/6th-edition-pmbok-pmp-exam-power-prep-weekend-course-san-diego-tickets-38457688983

It is a winning combination! What are you waiting for? Don’t live in the Southern California area? There are other options in 2018, as well as getting your key to PM City. Become a PMP Citizen and get learning!

Take the 5th Edition Exam or Wait for the 6th?

I get the question regularly, “Should I rush and sit for the 5th edition of the PMP exam or should I wait for the 6th edition? Everyone is telling me to take the PMP exam now because it is changing.”

As this is a common inquiry, I decided to type up one of my responses here in this blog to hopefully help others with the same question.

In short, whether you obtain your PMP via the 5^th edition or 6^th you should be ok. The reason that a changeover gathers so much attention is that when the PMBOK changed from 2nd to 3rd and 3rd to 4th they were relatively drastic. The exams also got more difficult – more situational, less memorization. And in terms of the 4th edition, the structure of the naming conventions got more logical and consistent, but drastically different for those who learned it in previous editions. Now the exam changes are more subtle. I would even argue that the changes are for the betterment of everyone and not overbearing. So now the rush to take an exam is more for those people who have been studying and want to test on the edition they have been working off of, as well as training companies wanting to capitalize on reason to push classes.

I have been thru many changeovers. I got my PMP on the 3^rd edition. I started instructing with the 3^rd edition. Was a contributor to the 4^th and 5^th editions of the PMBOK [so if you get a 5^th edition, you will see my name on p501, but if you get a 6^th you will not].  Have created courses for 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th editions. Now I am building a 6^th edition online course in the way that I would have liked – interactive, visual, and engaging. Point being, whether you cram and take a weekday or weekend in person class (which is the way I got my PMP 13 years ago) or online or a combination of them in either 5^th or 6^th, you will be fine. My recommendation to people is to choose study options that fit your learning style and your timing. Are you better at reading… sitting in a class with an instructor… talking with others… going at your own pace or the pace of others… visual learner or prefer lectures… like to do a little each day or fully immersed days…etc.

Do you have a time crunch or just want to get it out of the way? The quickest way is to buckle down and do nothing but prepare and sit for the exam. If not able to afford the high costs, the time off work, and the hours of dedication in short order, then get online courses like mine and other resources and carve out a plan that is realistic AND hold yourself to it! Schedule your exam early and hold yourself to it. Having a deadline set and telling yourself you cannot move it makes you more focused and motivated. It is too easy to pushback something that is not rooted or set. Much harder to deprioritize the exam when you are committed to a date and time.

There are a lot of options out there. Many people use many options. Really it comes down to you. Are you disciplined to study on your own? Are you disciplined to focus for 2-5 days in a class and sit for exam soon after while everything is still jiggling around in your brain?

Let me know what you decide. I am curious about your story. You can enter your stories and thoughts in the comment section.

If you would like to take advantage of my training offering, snagging it now is definitely financially advantageous [only $99 if pre-order; $720 if post-launch in January]. If your plan is to time it for the 6^th edition, then using The Crowd Training course on its own or in combination with any other type of course puts you in good hands. If you plan to go for the 5^th edition, I do have some games that you could play to help you prepare!

Best of luck!

My Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam Prep App

My Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam Prep App

Screenshot from my windows 8 PMP app

For Windows 8 computers, laptops, and tablets, I created – with the help of my C# programmer friend – an app with questions I have written.  These questions have been used in my PMP Exam Prep courses over the years.  They have been tweaked and updated per the feedback from my students and others.  Beyond trying to provide prospective PMP exam takers with good, relevant questions, I also wanted to provide them with the experience of taking the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam as it is administered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

So those using my app will experience the PMP test taking experience as much as I could emulate.  The exam questions have the 4 answer choices.  There is ability to go back or forward; and even the option to jump to any question you like.  You can ‘Mark’ or ‘Skip’ questions.  There is a grid displaying which questions have been answered or marked (from there you can go directly to any question you feel).  Like the real PMP exam, you can change your answer as many times as you like until you submit.  Once you submit, your score is provided.  Then, unlike the real exam, I have written some rationale for every single question so that you can get some feedback and reason for why the answers are considered correct or incorrect.  The app displays the answer you selected, as well as the correct answer, if different.

Thank you for checking out my app.  I have an Agile Project Management Exam prep app (PMI-ACP) in the Windows Store as well.  I am working on an ITIL Foundation version.  If you have questions for other certification exams, we can plug those in as well.