How to document hours for the PMP exam?

Question

I was just filling my PMP application and I've reached a point in the application where I have to document hours. Is there any guide on how to do this? How can I distribute my project management work experience hours between the different domain areas? I mean it's really hard for me what was my involvement on every project? Is it OK if I wasn't THAT accurate in my application?

Answer 1

The process for documenting hours (experience) for the PMP exam (or any PMI application, for that matter) is straightforward:

- You write down, on a scratch paper, all the projects that you have worked on
- You remember what kind of work you have done on each project (scheduling, risk management, etc...)
- You remember what was the date range that you did the specific project management work and on which project

Now, as soon as you have this information, you can start filling in the PMP application, just remember the following two things before:

- Overlapped project management experience counts only once. For example, if you say that you did scheduling in January of 2012 and Risk Management also in January of 2012, then you can only count this experience as 1 month.
- Only document project management work

Now PMI knows that you don't have to be accurate at the hour-level, so don't worry about that (just make sure you don't deceive PMI, because if you get caught, you get banned from taking any PMI exam for the rest of your life, read this: http://www.projectmanagementquestions.com/5973/recourse-after-being-banned-there-similar-certs-available )