Anthrocide

I shall be brief. To handle software development projects for the State of Missouri where I work, one must have completed a Missouri certification course in project management. A few years ago I went through the course and am Missouri-certified. During and since that training many have alluded to the more prestigious–and more difficult to attain–international credential from the Project Management Institute. The certification is as a Project Management Professional or PMP. I have shrugged at the PMP since I had achieved enough to do my job and saw no need to go through the grueling process required to get the more noteworthy credential. Then, a few months ago, a co-worker told my boss that there was a special lower-cost opportunity to take a “boot camp” preparatory course designed to help one pass the PMP exam, all paid-for by the State. So my boss enthusiastically signed-up and strongly urged me to do so. When I balked he insisted that this was something I really, really needed to do. Since he was the boss and it was free, I caved-in and signed-up. Not long after, my boss resigned!

I went ahead and took the course (and so did he). But naturally, there’s no value in taking an Exam Prep course and investing 4 full days of my life in it and not taking the exam. So, I also arranged to take it Saturday, June 23. The course instructor was a PhD meaning he had taken plenty of tests in his life and he said this was the toughest he’d ever taken. As it turned out, what the course taught was only directly applicable to about a third of the 200 questions on the exam. The rest was part deduction and part guesswork.

Bottom line: I did not ace the test, but I did pass it. So now I am a credentialed Project Management Professional. That means that, if I want, I can put the letters PMP after my name. However, that looks too much like a word for a very different occupation so I won’t be doing that.