Passed on my second attempt!
I have +13 years of experience in project/program/product management at a FAANG company. The company paid for the training for the 35 PDUs last year with a certified training company. I didn't pay too much attention to the training since it was virtual and I had to deal with work at the same time, but I still wanted to get the certification since it was fully paid by the company, including the exam fee. Right after finishing the training, I took all the content I received (including the PMBOK that came with it) and put everything into a knowledge base in an AI system (chatbot). I prompted the AI to only answer my questions using that content, so I could try to ensure its answers were grounded in the actual material. Finally, I got my act together in August 2025 for the exam application. I got the approval and failed my first attempt in October after watching the Joseph Phillips cram session and taking 2 full practice exams and some mini-exams. I must say I didn't prepare well; I thought I did, but I didn't. Also, I had no idea that retaking the exam came with a $275 fee, which was pretty depressing to find out — this time, my company wasn't going to cover it.
Fast forward to 2026: I planned to take the exam in late March/early April, so I started preparing in January. I think this time I was more aware of how hard this exam really is, and having sat for it once before gave me a lot more perspective. Below is the approach I took — but before I get into it, I want to say something I think is really important: please spend time figuring out what actually works for you before you dive in. The information on this sub is amazing, but for me it was becoming overwhelming because I started feeling like I had to do exactly what everyone else was doing (watching 200 ultra hard questions a lot of times, buying Third3Rock study notes, etc). So I tried to stay calm and trust that I know myself well enough to understand what kind of content works for me versus what doesn't. Studying and learning are personal. Please invest time on understanding what's the best FOR YOU.
My resources were:
- Study Hall — I bought the more expensive tier this time, honestly it didn't make a huge difference for me. I only did one full practice exam and leaned more on the mini-exams to avoid fatigue. Again, I was trusting myself and the process I built for myself.
- I built a solid Excel spreadsheet to track my results across domains, tasks, and difficulty levels. Fully automated with all the formulas so I just had to focus on logging the results. (Happy to share if anyone's interested, just let me know.)
- A podcast called "PMP Study Vault" on Spotify, which is AI-generated using NotebookLM. I'm guessing whoever created it used the PMBOK or something similar because the quality of the content is top-notch.
- My chatbot that I built a year ago.
- Andrew's Mindset Video.
- A notebook
My approach:
- Podcast for whenever I was driving. I started from the first episode and worked through it. When I was done driving, I took notes on any concepts mentioned in the podcast that I wasn't fully clear on or needed better explanations for.
- The concepts I didn't understand, I brought to my chatbot and asked the AI to explain them in as many different ways as needed until it clicked.
- Study Hall mini-exams and one full exam. I tried to space them out so I could go back, study with my chatbot, and return with the knowledge I was missing. Just reading the answer explanations in Study Hall wasn't enough for me, sometimes they don't fully make sense and I needed more detail. So I would paste the full question into my chatbot and discuss with the AI why the correct answer was right, get further explanation, work through analogies, etc.
- I watched the Andrew Mindset video once, but I made sure to take thorough notes on everything and reviewed those notes whenever I needed a reset.
- A few months ago, someone posted a framework for exam questions here that I turned into a mental prompt I call "MPPP": M → Methodology, P → Phase, P → Problem statement, P → PM is asked to… Whenever I was in a practice exam or the real exam, I'd mentally run through "MPPP" and identify all four elements before answering.
- The week before the exam, I was exhausted. I wasn't scoring well on the mini-exams and was getting frustrated and stressed, so I decided to stop doing them entirely. Instead, I focused on listening to the podcast and watched the "How to Tell if You're Ready for the PMP Exam" video on youtube from David McLachlan, taking notes on everything I wasn't 100% confident about, then going to my chatbot for explanations, which I wrote by hand in a notebook. I even drew diagrams, matrices, etc. I used this as a way to help my brain retain and recall things. All my notes from that final week were handwritten rather than typed, which felt very different from how I'd been studying before.
I took my second exam last Saturday (proctored from home) and finally passed. One tip for anyone taking the exam from home: make sure your Bluetooth mouse has fresh batteries, and if you're using any adapters to connect your laptop to a monitor or camera, test them beforehand. My Bluetooth mouse stopped working suddenly when I only had 40 questions left. I was displaying the exam on a monitor — I had to open the laptop, the exam ended automatically, the camera stopped working, and I panicked. Fortunately, the proctor was kind and helped me troubleshoot, but I was absolutely panicked and thought I was going to have to sit for the exam a third time.