Project Management Institute (PMI) is the premium Project Management Institute based out of USA. It conducts Certified Associate of Project Management (CAPM) and Project Management Professional (PMP Preparation Training) examination for certifying individuals as Project Management Associate and Professionals respectively.

As part of PMP certification prerequisites, PMI has essentially two eligibility requirements. Both must be fulfilled by any PMP aspirant wishing to appear for the exam. They are

• Education on PMI’s Project management also called as PMP Preparation Training

• Real-life Professional project management experience

Attending PMI’s PMP Management Training education course is the other requirement that an aspirant needs to fufill before appearing for the exam.

This eligibility says, as a PMP aspirant, you need have 35 hours of formal project management education. Each hour is equal to one PDU (Professional Development Unit) roughly.

PMP education is offered as a class room session or online training from any of the PMI REP (Registered Education Providers). Typically this would include 4 days of classroom session or 40 hours of online training.

During the 4 days of training at Palium Skills, the trainer explains the different types of questions that come, breakup of questions by process groups, sample questions to give a feel of things to aspirants. It also covers details of application fill-up and how to write out the application.

Let us now look at the requirement of Real-life Professional project management experience.

If one is holding a bachelor’s degree, then one needs to have 4,500 hours or 3 years or 36 months of project leading and directing the tasks specified by PMI. For easy comparison, one year has 2,000 hours so 4,500 hours mean about 2 years 3 months of project management experience.

If you are a high school graduate, you need to have 7,500 hours or 5 years or 60 months of project leading and directing the tasks specified by PMI.

Couple of things to note while considering Project Management experience -

1. PMI considers only non-overlapping project management experience. So one cannot use experience where one has worked on multiple projects at the same time.

2. Always use recent project management experience. As PMI considers project management experience which has been accumulated by an individual in the last 8 years or so, prior to submission of your PMP application.

If you are able to satisfy the above criteria, then irrespective of which industry you are working for, you are eligible to attempt for the PMP Preparation Training Exam.

In case one does not fulfill the eligibility criteria to appear for the PMP certification exam, as described above then one can consider CAPM certification exam, which requires less amount of project management experience compared to PMP certification. Full form of CAPM is certified associate in Project Management.

We provide experienced trainers who can conduct online and classroom training on various certification topics like ITIL v3 Foundation, PMP Preparation Training, TOGAF9.1, Prince2 Certification, OCA, OCP, MCSA, MCSE .

If you have query on any aspect of certification then feel free to send us an email at

palium.skills@gmail.com and we will be happy to respond!