The 15-day CAPM (2024)

The Certified Associate in Project Management, or CAPM, is the entry-level certificate from the Project Management Institute (PMI) for people wanting to find work as project managers. From start to finish, the process usually takes one month to three months of prep and costs around $395 on average.

In this article, I want to talk about finding lower bounds on earning the CAPM certification, spending as little time and money as possible on it. From start to finish, I spent 15 days preparing the CAPM and it cost me $288 in total. I only used the following resources:

• Joseph Phillips’ CAPM Exam Prep Seminar from Udemy for $10.99
• CAPM Pocket Prep App for iOS, “Classic: 320 questions” for $19.99
• Ricardo Vargas PMBOK Process Flow Video, free (YouTube)
• PMI Student Bundle for Exam + Membership for $257.00

Here’s a summary of how I prepared for the CAPM in 15 days.

Offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI), the CAPM doesn’t require any sort of prior work experience in project management. It’s perfect for a high school grad, college student, or college grad at the start of their career.

To qualify to take the CAPM, you need to take a course with at least 23 hours in project management education. There’s an alternative path to qualify where you have a high school diploma + 1,500 hours of work experience (around 9 months of full-time employment) but that’s sometimes complicated to prove. The exam content is also so specialized that the 23-hour course will directly help you prepare for the exam anyways.

The CAPM itself is a 3-hour exam with 150 multiple choice questions (four choices per question). It typically only takes 90 minutes or so. There’s no official “passing score”, but some estimates put the minimum score at around 65%, or about 100/150 questions correct to pass.

The PMBOK Guide is available on the PMI website for free to members of PMI (membership costs $130 a year). The CAPM goes hand-in-hand with the PMBOK Guide — the PMBOK Guide is something of a syllabus for the exam.

In general, the exam tests a holistic understanding of the project management processes in the PMBOK Guide and, in a lot of ways, relies on testing your memorization. Every question can be solved by having a thorough understanding of PMBOK, or just like memorizing 500 things.

I started the process by purchasing the best CAPM course available online.

Joseph Phillips’ CAPM Exam Prep Seminar is an excellent course for satisfying the education prerequisite for the CAPM. It is the most cost-efficient way to get that education pre-requisite since you can watch the lectures on your own and speed them up to 2x speed (can’t do that with an in-person seminar).

This course is how I did my first “learning” of the exam content. Some people will recommend you independently read the PMBOK Guide, but I strongly advise against it. It feels like reading a dictionary. It gets super super boring really fast. By taking this course instead (and watching the lectures at 2x speed) you get Joe to basically read you the PMBOK Guide and offer his commentary. It’s like standing on a moving sidewalk versus having to walk on your own. Much less work, same destination.

There are 22 sections in the Joe Phillips online course. The first 2 are a short introduction to the layout of the course, then 4 short sections easing the student into project management, 14 content sections with the meat of the content useful for preparing for the exam, 1 review section, and 1 section that just contains two practice exams.

I spent about 2 hours a day listening to the course with one rest day in the middle where I didn’t do any work. Some sections in the middle get kind of boring, so it took discipline to stick through to the end of every section. I took notes on the key terms and ITTOs for each section.

At the end of Day 12, I received a certificate showing I completed the course. I immediately went to the PMI website, purchased the student bundle for $257. I wanted to sign up for a test date asap since I’d heard that slots sometimes were filled up weeks in advance.

I finished the course on a Friday and went to register for the exam on Saturday morning. I saw the next available test slot was on the following Tuesday morning at 9:30am. I signed up for it.

Between finishing the course and actually taking the CAPM exam, I only had two full uninterrupted days to study. There were three aspects to my studying approach: practice exams, memorizing processes, and memorizing ITTOs.

Finding good CAPM practice questions is tough since PMI doesn’t explicitly publish practice questions. The next best resource is the CAPM Pocket Prep App which has high-quality questions comparable to those on the exam.

The app offers a few questions for free, but the $19.99 upgrade to “Classic” unlocks 320 total questions which felt about right for hitting all the major topics. There’s the “Ultimate” upgrade with 720 total questions for $34.99, but that didn’t feel necessary since the 320 questions was plenty.

I would set up 10-question practice sets and, early on, I’d get around 60% on these sets. As I practiced more and became comfortable with the style of the questions, I was getting closer to 80% on average.

The best part of the app is how it sorts the questions by knowledge area so you have a better sense of what you need to work on. Everything about the app is very polished and professional, but being able to sort by knowledge area truly makes it indispensable in my opinion. It was easy to spend hour-long sessions lying on my back, looking up at my phone in bed, moving through the app and just going through practice questions.

I can’t say this enough: the Pocket Prep app was the single most valuable resource I used during the “studying” part of my exam prep. I recommend either the 320 question “Classic” package I bought, or the 750 question “Ultimate” package if you feel like you need the extra practice.

There are 49 processes in the PMBOK — it’s good practice to memorize the names and order of all 49 of them as well as how they flow from one to another. If you can memorize each process and be able to provide a one-sentence description of each process, you’re gonna pass the exam easily.

There is a video by Ricardo Vargas which does an amazing job of explaining each process and its relationship to those before and after it. While watching his video, I made flash cards, one for each process, and by the end of my practice, could recite all 49 processes in order from memory. This is crucial.

In my opinion, there are two levels of craziness you can go to for memorizing Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs (ITTOs) — the simpler level is that you could memorize ITTOs as far as being able to recognize what’s an input versus a tool/technique versus an output. For example, is “expert judgement” an input, tool/technique, or output? (in this case, it is a tool/technique). That is just the first level of memorization — you could also go one-step further and memorize which processes have which ITTOs mapped to them. For example, what are the inputs to the “Develop Project Charter” process? (answer is Business documents, Agreements, EEFs, OPAs). I personally found that the first level of memorization is more valuable on a time cost-benefit basis in trying to maximize your score on the exam.

I studied around 6 hours a day for the two days before the exam — typically 3 hours of practice exams in the morning/early afternoon, then 3 hours of memorizing and reciting processes/identifying ITTOs in the afternoons and evenings. One easy exercise I could do on my own was writing out all 49 processes on a sheet of paper — I did this 3 or 4 times without a mistake the evening before the exam.

I arrived at the test center around 8:45am for the exam scheduled for 9:30am. It was a quiet morning so after checking in with my passport, I got started with the exam right away. I was glad I didn’t have to wait until the “official” start time since the test center was pretty quiet that morning.

I can’t speak extensively to the content of the exam because of the PMI Code of Ethics, but in general, there weren’t any surprises. The Pocket Prep app proved to be an excellent resource for practicing exam questions. The computer program used to administer the exam was generally intuitive and easy to use.

I submitted around 1.5 hours after starting the exam. Shortly after submitting, I got a screen where the first line read “Congratulations!” I had passed. After leaving the testing room, the testing administrator printed out a piece of paper with my “PASS” result and a breakdown of proficiency by category.

Earning the CAPM was a valuable experience. The content of the PMBOK Guide, though encyclopedic at times, is a really robust framework on which to base your approach to project management. I think there’s great value in the learnings but they are quite dense — the equivalent to a semester-long college course in terms of content.

I definitely felt rushed completing the CAPM in 15 days, but that was intentional. One topic covered in the PMBOK Guide is Parkinson’s Law and I have written about it here on Medium before. By limiting my time intentionally, I was able to achieve greater efficiency and not waste time in the process of earning my certification

I think my individual circ*mstances for completing the CAPM were extremely favorable — I didn’t have to think about school or work while preparing for the exam and had 15 uninterrupted days to learn. The test center near me had substantial availability so I didn’t experience any delays scheduling my exam.

Don’t be afraid to dive into the CAPM! It’s a foundation for project management. Most of the skills of a project manager are learned from everyday work on the job, but the CAPM is an academic’s view on what good project management looks like in theory. For a non-hyper-accelerated program, you can earn the CAPM in 3 weeks or 4 weeks if you push yourself and stay disciplined during preparation.

The CAPM was a wonderful learning experience and I encourage anyone looking to get into project management to give it a shot.