Did you work hard to earn your Project Management Professional certification? If you're like most people you certainly did and now is not the time to let it slip away. Remember you need 60 Professional Development Unit's (PDUs) every 3 years to maintain your certification in Project Management.
Maintaining your PMP certification is not as hard as you might think, plan your re-certification as you would any project you've worked on. Plan your project well, look at the low hanging fruit and accomplish these small task first and then move on from there. This article is not a how-to for earning PDUs but rather a gentle reminder and motivational tool to keep you on the right track. Many of my friends and co-workers who are also PMPs get themselves very stressed out on how to earn the credits they need in the short three year allotment provided by the Project Management Institute (PMI). I remind them of the commitment they made in the beginning when they decided to go for the certification and that it's a thousand times easier just to maintain the certification - earn those PDUs!
There are many sources on the web that offers online course which some are expensive and some are not, you decide. There are free webinars and conference calls that can also earn you credits towards re-certification. And off course the most obvious is the PMI website which has a ton of invaluable information for you to read up on. If you're not spending a lot of time on this website then you are only hurting yourself by not staying in tune with what is happening in the Project Management Community.
One simple task you can do to earn PDUs is take online courses. This is one of my favorites because it benefits me twofold. I recently attained my Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certification and was able to contribute most of these online courses toward my PMP re-certification. So I earned the ITIL certification and applied credits toward my PDUs - win/win. I hope you're starting to see that it's not that difficult to get those 60 PDUs in 3 years.
The certification I'm working on now is the Certified Six Sigma Green Belt (CSSGB) certification. I'm taking a similar path to the one I took when studying to get my PMP. A lot of online course work and many hours at the computer teaching myself this new methodology is beneficial. I remind myself often that this will all be worth it in the end because I know I'll have the CSSGB certification and of course I'll be adding credits to my PDU requirement.
The last thing I should mention here is the most obvious of all the methods to earn PDUs. In case you didn't know, you can earn PDUs on the job. That's right, if you are currently working as a PMP Project Manager you can claim a certain amount of credits for what you do every day.
Please check the PMI website for all of the different ways you can earn those Professional Development Units in the different categories. Don't be afraid to try something different, learn something new every day and have fun while you're taking the journey of maintaining your Project Management Professional certification.
Regards,
Chuck LaPenta, PMP - Senior Project Manager with over 15 years of telecommunications experience.
http://pmp-project-manager.com/
