Project Management Professional test PASS

I passed the Project Management Professional today. It was the culmination of a seven month long pursuit to get a professional certification for the experiences I had in the military.

The test itself is 200 multiple choice questions long, and takes up to 4 hours. Although I finished in 3 hours, I used the last hour to review the first hundred questions. I'm glad I did -- there were about a dozen for which I changed my answers.

A few takeaways from the test:

• There were a lot of questions about "what to do when things go bad" and "how to you handle this HR situation."
• There were a lot of change management questions -- when to submit change requests and things like that.
• There weren't a lot of math questions, and even those few were simple. There was a calculator function, but I didn't need to use it.
• There were two questions about things I hadn't studied: beta distributions and affinity diagrams.

Looking back, I'm really glad I passed. Honestly, I wouldn't have been surprised if -- once I'd finished the Review -- it had told me I'd failed. That's how uncertain I was about how I did. And what would have been worse, I would not have known what to study if I hadn't passed.

I'd say I'm happy to have it over with, but I probably don't understand the full benefit of having a PMP at this point. Maybe that's because I don't have any job offers on the table that require it, or maybe that's because already have a job that I like, but either way -- I'll probably feel more strongly about it once I get some better offers. In any case, I'm a straight up PMP.