Cheetah’s first PMP Exam Prep Course – September 10, 2001 – September 14, 2001
This was the scene we saw on the morning break the second day of Cheetah’s first four day accelerated PMP exam prep program.
Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP, RYT
Many of us know exactly where we were and what we were doing on September 11, 2001 when that second plane flew into the twin towers. I remember it as clear as if it were yesterday. We were out on a break from Cheetah’s first Accelerated PMP Exam Prep course in Marlborough, Massachusetts just outside of Boston. My students and I watched the TV in the hotel coffee shop in disbelief as a plane flew into a tower in New York City. We kept to our course schedule as was our promise to our students but back in the class we had an open discussion on how to proceed as every single one of us was in shock about what we had just seen.
We agreed to take a little time to connect with our families as most of our students had traveled in from elsewhere in the US for the program. There was universal consensus we move forward with the course. The hotel where we were holding the class became very crowded – we were near Boston after all and all the flights had shut down. We made an agreement to only focus on the task at hand while in the classroom – and that was to pass the PMP exam on Friday. To this day, we still honor this practice to insure our students can pass the very difficult PMP exam after only four days of prep.
That Friday, every single student took the actual PMP exam. The majority of them passed. The next month, we were teaching at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. This was in viewing distance of the Twin Towers – ground zero in New York City. Again we kept to our practice – only focus on the PMP exam. Again, all our students passed the PMP exam on Friday after four days in our intensive immersion PMP exam prep program.
Cheetah’s four day PMP accelerated exam prep program took off from there. We were quickly teaching four to eight courses every month, expanding worldwide in just a couple of years. Everywhere the practice was the same – only focus on doing what was required to pass the PMP exam on the fifth day of class. I have no idea if we would have adopted this practice or not had we not started teaching our new accelerated approach to prepping for the PMP exam the week of 9/11. This has stood the test of time and we still get the majority of people passing the PMP exam after four days of intense, focused, interactive, and mind expanding learning.
“The first thing my boss said when I told him I was interested in getting my PMP certification was that if I was going to do it, he’d heard Cheetah Learning was the best.”