What Does it Take to Pass the PMP Exam – Three Key Skills (How has this changed over the past twenty years?)
Michelle LaBrosse, PMP, CAC, PMI-ACP, CCPM, RYT
What Does it Take to Pass the PMP Exam?
Today, September 14, 2021 is the twenty year anniversary of our first Cheetah student passing the PMP exam after Cheetah’s four day accelerated exam prep program. We know a thing or two after twenty years of helping tens of thousands of Cheetah students pass the PMP exam, with just four days of prep (the majority of Cheetah students take the actual PMP exam – and pass it – the day after their Cheetah course ends). We’ve also seen quite a few changes happen in the past twenty years that make passing the PMP exam now a different experience than it was twenty years ago.
Here is what it takes today to pass the PMP exam:
- Stay focused on the task at hand (passing the PMP exam). This has not changed but people’s ability to avoid distractions has decreased. Luckily what has also changed is the technology to improve focus is as close as what also causes problems with focus – your smart phone. Cheetah students use an app they download on their smart phone that improves their ability to focus.
- Be adept at the strategy for logically deducing the correct answer on the PMP exam. Again, this one has not changed either, but the content on the PMP exam has changed dramatically. There are new PM methodologies to know how to navigate and we have new tricks to ferret out which approach makes the most sense based on key terms in the current exam questions.
- Maintain a state of relaxed focus to be able to best access the right parts of your brain during the exam. Twenty years later and this is still a key skill. What has changed though is people’s level of anxiety. When we started this twenty years ago – about 10% of students had fairly severe test anxiety. Now, we’re seeing 90% of students having severe test anxiety. We live in a far more anxious world now where there is a greater perception the stakes for failure are much higher. We’ve added in a few new techniques that are working very well with reducing the increased anxiety.
Cheetah students today all pass the PMP exam at the “above target” level – we’ve learned a thing or two over the past two decades to help the high performers who are attracted to Cheetah, maintain their level of high performance.
If you want to reduce your time to prep for the PMP exam, and do so with an exhilarating accelerated learning experience where you’ll learn new ways of assimilating vast amounts of information very quickly, we’re what you’re looking for – www.cheetahlearning.com .
“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.”