In the years that I have been helping people pass the PMP® exam, I have come across a small number of seasoned Project Managers that were unable to pass the exam. More often than not, these people were either referred to me or reached out to me because they had recently failed the PMP® exam and didn’t know where they had gone wrong. The typical profile of this person was someone who was a savvy PM, who had maybe between 10 and 20 years’ experience running projects. For many of these folks it seemed completely meaningless that they should have to, at this point in their career, have this career-blocking exam placed in front them. They’d been successfully running projects for decades, and couldn’t understand why they needed the exam, or why it was proving so difficult to pass.

The truth is, the PMP® exam has become a de facto standard — globally — for Project Managers, and in most industries it’s accepted as a standard bearer for the things a PM should know when running a project. Many ...