Why you should find a mentor to help you through the PMP

The Project Management Professional (PMP) process can be a lengthy and difficult one to navigate, even though there’s a good deal of information that can be found on the internet as to how best to handle the process. Yet there can be conflicting information as well. Should you study alone? With a group? Should you take a class, or rely on online tools and purchased workbooks to get yourself ready? Deciding what to do in these situations can be easier with the help of a mentor, someone to help guide you through the process.

What can a mentor do? Well, in the first place, a mentor can help you figure out your timetable for completing the PMP certification. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, as you need to factor in how much time you can devote to studying for the test given your current schedule, and then when exactly would be optimal to take the test. Once you’ve decided on that, you need to figure out how exactly you’ll prepare. This can be tricky to determine on your own, as you may not be the best judge of your own character! This is why it’s helpful to pick a mentor who knows you well, who knows your personality and quirks and how you work best. That way, your mentor can determine whether it would be best for you to sign up for a class, or if you have enough self-discipline to study on your own.

Of course, studying on your own simply means that you’d forgo the discipline of a regularly scheduled class. You still might want to look into the possibility of finding a study group to work with, and this too is something your mentor can help you figure out. Are you enough of a self-starter that you can truly handle the rigor of studying completely on your own? Perhaps a study group would be an optimal in-between measure, where you’d still have other people encouraging you and motivating you to study, without the pressure of an actual class.

A mentor can also be helpful as a sounding board or someone to turn to with questions, which you’ll surely have as you make your way through the PMP certification process. Those questions might be related to the test itself, or to networking, or your career path after you have the PMP certification in hand. Presumably you’ve chosen a mentor who has solid footing in the PMP industry; as such, that person can help introduce you to people or at least point you in the right direction, of how you can set about establishing yourself in the world of PMPs.