“What is this ‘4500 hours of Work Experience Details in PMP® Application Form ?” During my introductory sessions on PMP® Certification, most of the professionals generally ask me this question and today, I’m addressing this issue.

Project Management Institute (PMI)® offers the world’s most sought after professional certification, Project Management Professional (PMP)®. To meet its eligibility criteria professionals are required to furnish a few important work experience details in PMP® Application Form.

To be precise, if you are applying for PMP® Certification Exam, then it is must for you to have 4500 hours of leading and directing project work experience. This means you must have 4 years of degree which makes 16 years of education. The work experience requirement increases to 7500 hours, i.e. 5 years of leading and directing project work, if you do not have a bachelor’s degree.

Sometimes, PMP® aspirants, find the terms ‘leading and directing project’ confusing. To explain  what ‘leading and directing project work experience means PMI® has introduced an important document called, ‘PMI® Examination Content Outline.’

In this content outline document, these two terms, ‘leading and directing’ are identified and explained under 5 domains. These domains are actually the 5 important roles a PMP® professional is required to perform.

1. Initiating– This is all about doing a work require to start the project or initiate it. It can be stakeholder identification, prepare a business case, selection of the project, and it may also involve doing high level scoping.
2. Planning– This is a critical activity of a project manager which begins with a high level scope, preparing the detailed scope statement, representing work breakdown structure, once the scope is documented you are also required to identify task/activities to be performed. Other activities like, allocating resources, schedule analysis, critical path analysis, planning to recruit more human resources to get some part of the job done, which is Procurement Planning, communication planning et al falls under this domain.
3. Executing– Now, it’s time to get the work done, since you have sequenced the activities, allocated them to concerned people. You ensure exact execution of the plan in adherence to quality and scope planning. You also perform conflict resolution, and individual performance assessment under this domain.
4. Controlling & Monitoring– This is all about ensuring that we are working as per our planning. Change management is the most important activity of this domain. Controlling scope, maintaining risk register and keeping an eye on vendor that he is adhering to his contract falls under this domain.
5. Closing– This the act of final acceptance, documentation of all the learning during the project, archiving documents, updating organization process assets, taking final acceptance from the customers. Whatever legal formalities are required to close the project falls under this domain.

Now, comes how to fill Work Experience Details In PMP® Application Form? It is a very simple 5 step process:

1. Project Information– Title of the project, start and end date, and the role you played in that project. The role may not match with your designation. There is one another field called industry in which you worked.
2. Organization Details– Physical address, contact details, location.
3. Organization Contact– Email and contact details, and the relationship between you and the primary contact person in that organization. In case you get selected for the audit you have to take signature of this particular person so make sure you identify an individual who is approachable.
4. Hours Per Domain Area– A PMP® applicant is required to document the specific hours spent in each of these 5 PMI Process Groups individually. Once you are done documenting and calculating your Project hours, you will deduce the total project work hours. It is important to note that you should have 4500 hours in total but it is not necessary that you should have experience in all the domains under a given project, but yes you should have experience in all domain in totality. Try not to have a parallel project, since only one project would be considered in any case.
5. Project Experience Summary– Try to pick activities from all those five processed where you have spent work hours and summarizes them under this head. You may write in bullet point statements or even in a paragraph statement.

Just be clear, you don’t need to be scientifically accurate about the numbers, try to pick activities that match with your domains and lastly, just ensure you have right primary contact, who is approachable in case your application gets selected for PMI® Audit Process.

I hope this blog has sufficiently answered your all queries related to how to fill in Work Experience Details in PMP® Application Form. Good Luck with your PMP® Certification Exam.

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