Friday 23 November 2012

3 years continual learning

Now that I am a PMP, I will continue to develop as a Project Manager and gain more knowledge, understanding and most importantly, experience. To maintain my PMP status, I must complete 60 PDUs (Professional Development Units) over the course of three years. There are two main categories of PDU, which are for Continued Education and Giving Back to the Profession.


The PDU Categories

The Continued education ensure that the PMP maintains their learning to keep up with the developments in the Project Management world. This might be covered by official courses relating to Project Management, or could involve attending conferences and seminars. You can obtain unlimited credits towards your 60 PDU requirement within this category.

The second category is related to Giving back to the Profession. This can include the simple tsk of working as a Project Manager. For each year, you can obtain 5 credits for working in a Project Management role. As part of my role, I like to mentor people, as I have indicated in a previous post. You can obtain 1 PDU for each hour you spend mentoring a fellow Project Manager.

A further option within this category is to produce content, such as writing blog article, a book or providing some Project Management training in your workplace. The above options are just a few of the options you have to complete your 60 PDU requirement. You have three years to achieve your requirements and can carry across 20 PDUs from your current 3 year cycle, to the next. If you fail to meet your target, you will no longer be a PMP, but you have one year to complete your requirements. If you fail this, you will have to retake the exam and start all over again.

My Plan

As like most things in my life, I have created a plan. I have a roadmap already created to ensure that I can achieve the required PDU count within my 3 year cycle. I am a contractor, so I do not like to take holiday to attend training courses, if possible, so I prefer to work my options around the other choices that the PMI give me. For the Education category, I simply plan to print off and read the PMI Today and the PM Network on a monthly basis. I will then highlight some of the articles on a monthly basis on this blog. All in all, this will take about 2 hours per month and I can claim 1 PDU per hour, but I will only claim 1. I plan to take 30 PDUs in this category. For the second category of Giving Back, I will be working as a Project Manager for all of the three years, so this will give me 15 PDUs. I plan to give a PMP presentation at work for the entire PMO department. This will take approximatly 7.5 hours to write and 1 hour to present, giving me 8.5 PDUs. Finally, I know that I will be doing some mentoring in my day to day role. I would plan to cover off 21.5 hours of mentoring quite easily within the next three years.

The Calculations

Education 
Read the PMI Today and the PM Network and write a blog article 30 times = 30 PDU

Giving Back 
Work as a project manager for three years = 15 PDU
Presentation = 8.5 PDU
Mentoring = 6.5 PDU

Further Information

http://www.pmi.org/Pages/Ten_Ways_to_Earn_PDUs.aspx

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