My opinion on PMP coursework

Q: What do you think of the PMP online course work and practice tests so far?

A: It sucks. I hate this.

The course work is completely unhelpful. I'm used to PowerPoint presentations with bullet points and a linear teaching style.

But O2O's PMP course uses Flash animation to make presentations that resemble fireworks displays. They're dazzling, but I learn nothing. I've watched presentations multiple times and still not gotten anything out of them.

The most helpful thing to do, I've found, is take the section pre-tests, and write down every question with its correct answer. Then, I skip through the presentations and do the section tests. Again, I write down every question and its correct answer.

Since the questions reviews require an 80% or higher to move on, I re-take the section test as many times as necessary to get a passing score. And move on.

There's another layer of difficulty that I only recently learned: the course work is in topical, not chronological order.

So instead of starting with the Start and ending with the End, they go through each process group in isolation -- procurement, stakeholders, scope, quality, resources, etc. By the end I had no idea no idea how anything pieced together.

Then, once I had finished everything, one of the program coordinators sent me this "Processes Flow Chart."

And I realized that I had to go back and reorganize everything I'd learned. So now I think of things like this:

The Integration process group is like the skeleton. It's the basic chronological order that drives the project forward. The other process groups are like the muscle and skin that fit around the skeleton.

And the reason why they start with Integration as #4 is because that's its chapter in the Project Management Book of Knowledge. The online course work is following the chapters in a book I don't have.

So I'm a bit irritated right now. Yes, I'm learning a lot from the practice tests, but it's slow going. I have no idea how long it's going to take me to get to the point where I stand a good change of passing an actual PMP test.