PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam Prep

What's inside

1. Level 1: Before You Start: What PMI Owns and What This Course IsFree
   [People] Sets out the ground rules before any study. The PMP Examination Content Outline (effective July 2026) belongs to PMI, is free from PMI and is not reproduced here. The eligibility rules (project experience plus 35 hours of project management education, or a CAPM) are PMI's, and this course does not grant contact hours. Check PMI's current exam handbook for the question count, time and fee. PMI, PMP and PMBOK are marks of Project Management Institute, Inc. This course is independent, is not a PMI Authorized Training Partner, is not endorsed by PMI and does not promise a pass.
2. Level 2: The Exam Blueprint: Domains, Tasks and Approach MixFree
   [People] Explains how the July 2026 outline is built: 26 tasks across three domains (People 33%, Process 41%, Business Environment 26%), with about 40% of questions set in predictive scenarios and about 60% in agile or hybrid ones. Shows how scenario 'best answer' questions are worded.
3. Level 3: The PMI Mindset I: Servant Leadership
   [People] Teaches servant leadership as the default stance in PMI scenarios: remove obstacles, protect the team, coach rather than command, and give the team room to make decisions.
4. Level 4: The PMI Mindset II: Act Before Escalating
   [People] Teaches the answer order PMI expects: (1) assess the situation, (2) talk to the people involved, (3) act within your own authority, (4) escalate only when the issue is beyond your authority or tolerance.
5. Level 5: The PMI Mindset III: The Agile and Hybrid Answer
   [People] Shows how the best answer changes with the delivery approach: use team-led, iterative and transparent responses in agile and hybrid settings, and plan-driven, formally controlled responses in predictive ones.
6. Level 6: Building a Common Vision
   [People] Covers how to create and keep a shared understanding of the project's purpose, using the project charter, a product vision statement, success criteria and a review of the vision whenever direction drifts.
7. Level 7: Leading the Team
   [People] Covers leading a high-performing team: team charters and ground rules, empowerment, self-organisation, team development stages (Tuckman), motivation, emotional intelligence and recognition, in co-located and virtual teams.
8. Level 8: Managing Conflict
   [People] Covers the sources of conflict and the five resolution approaches (collaborate/problem-solve, compromise, smooth/accommodate, force/direct, withdraw/avoid), and when each one is the right choice.
9. Level 9: Identifying and Analysing Stakeholders
   [People] Covers finding stakeholders early and throughout the project, keeping a stakeholder register and ranking stakeholders with power/interest grids and the salience model.
10. Level 10: Engaging Stakeholders
    [People] Covers moving stakeholders from their current to their desired engagement level (unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, leading) with an engagement assessment matrix, an engagement plan and agile practices such as sprint reviews and customer collaboration.
11. Level 11: Aligning Stakeholder Expectations
    [People] Covers turning competing stakeholder expectations into agreed objectives, success criteria and priorities through workshops, negotiation and clear decision rights.
12. Level 12: Managing Expectations Through Delivery
    [People] Covers keeping expectations realistic once work is under way: frequent demos, information radiators, honest forecasts, and early, open conversations about trade-offs and bad news.
13. Level 13: Capturing Knowledge
    [People] Covers the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge and how to capture knowledge continuously through the lessons learned register, retrospectives and knowledge repositories, rather than only at closure.
14. Level 14: Transferring Knowledge
    [People] Covers sharing knowledge across the team and into operations: pairing, mentoring, communities of practice, onboarding new members and planned handover to the people who will support the product.
15. Level 15: Planning Communication
    [People] Covers building a communications management plan: analysing stakeholders' information needs, choosing push, pull or interactive methods, counting communication channels with n(n-1)/2, and planning lightweight agile communication.
16. Level 16: Managing and Monitoring Communication
    [People] Covers carrying out and adjusting communication: virtual and cross-cultural teams, active listening and feedback, agile events used as communication, and checking whether messages were received and understood.
17. Level 17: Choosing the Delivery Approach
    [Process] Covers choosing and tailoring a predictive, adaptive or hybrid approach from factors such as requirements stability, risk, regulatory constraints, team experience and organisational culture.
18. Level 18: Building the Integrated Project Plan
    [Process] Covers putting the subsidiary plans and baselines (scope, schedule, cost) into one project management plan, and aligning a release or roadmap plan with predictive milestones in hybrid projects.
19. Level 19: Managing Scope in Predictive Projects
    [Process] Covers predictive scope management: collecting requirements, the scope statement, the WBS and WBS dictionary, the scope baseline, the requirements traceability matrix, and the difference between validating scope and controlling it.
20. Level 20: Managing Scope with Backlogs
    [Process] Covers adaptive scope management: the product backlog, user stories and acceptance criteria, INVEST, the definition of done, backlog refinement, and the product owner's ownership of priority.
21. Level 21: Validating and Controlling Scope
    [Process] Learn how predictive and adaptive projects confirm that deliverables are accepted and keep unapproved work out, using acceptance criteria, a definition of done and scope validation with the customer.
22. Level 22: Prioritising for Value: MVP, MMF and Backlog Order
    [Process] Learn how value-based delivery orders work by business value, risk and dependencies, using techniques such as MoSCoW, Kano, weighted shortest job first, a minimum viable product and a minimum marketable feature.
23. Level 23: Incremental Delivery and Benefits Realisation
    [Process] Learn how to plan and check the delivery of business value across increments and releases, linking outputs to the business case, the benefits management plan and measurable outcomes.
24. Level 24: Predictive Scheduling: Sequencing and Critical Path
    [Process] Learn to break work into activities, sequence them with dependencies and leads or lags, and find the critical path, total float and free float in a network diagram.
25. Level 25: Estimating Durations and Compressing Schedules
    [Process] Learn analogous, parametric and three-point (PERT) estimating, and how to recover a late schedule by crashing, fast tracking or resource levelling and smoothing, with the trade-offs of each.
26. Level 26: Adaptive and Hybrid Schedules: Releases and Velocity
    [Process] Learn how agile and hybrid teams plan schedules with timeboxes, relative estimates (story points), velocity, release plans and roadmaps, and fit adaptive iterations into predictive milestones.
27. Level 27: Planning and Acquiring Team Resources
    [Process] Learn to plan the people a project needs and get them, using a resource management plan, a RACI chart, resource calendars, pre-assignment, negotiation and virtual or distributed teams.
28. Level 28: Managing Physical Resources and Team Capacity
    [Process] Learn to manage equipment, materials and facilities, and to balance team capacity in predictive and agile settings, including just-in-time supply, work-in-progress limits and sustainable pace.
29. Level 29: Procurement Planning: Make-or-Buy and Contract Types
    [Process] Learn how to decide whether to make or buy, and how fixed-price, cost-reimbursable and time-and-materials contracts split risk between buyer and seller.
30. Level 30: Conducting Procurements and Managing Sellers
    [Process] Learn to select sellers using source selection criteria, manage contracts and claims, and use agile-friendly contracting such as fixed-price increments and adjustable-scope arrangements.
31. Level 31: Cost Estimating, Budgets and Reserves
    [Process] Learn to build a cost baseline and a project budget from estimates, and to tell contingency reserves for known risks apart from management reserves for unknown ones.
32. Level 32: Earned Value Management and Forecasting
    [Process] Learn to calculate and interpret planned value, earned value, actual cost, variances, performance indices and forecasts such as EAC, ETC and TCPI to judge cost and schedule performance.
33. Level 33: Planning and Managing Quality
    [Process] Learn to plan quality standards and use cost of quality, prevention over inspection, and continuous, built-in quality practices in predictive and agile delivery.
34. Level 34: Quality Control Tools and Root Cause Analysis
    [Process] Learn to read and choose quality tools, including control charts, Pareto charts, cause-and-effect diagrams, histograms, scatter diagrams and checksheets, to find and fix the causes of defects.
35. Level 35: Evaluating Status: Metrics, Burn Charts and Reports
    [Process] Learn to evaluate project status using variance analysis, dashboards, burndown and burnup charts, cumulative flow diagrams, cycle time and lead time, and to report it openly to stakeholders.
36. Level 36: Closing a Project or Phase
    [Process] Learn the steps for closing a project, phase or contract: confirming final acceptance, closing procurements, releasing resources, transferring the product, archiving lessons learned and handling early termination.
37. Level 37: Project Governance and Decision Rights
    [Business Environment] Learn how governance frameworks, PMOs, steering committees, phase gates and escalation paths set decision rights and thresholds, and how governance is tailored for agile and hybrid delivery.
38. Level 38: Compliance: Regulatory, Legal and Policy Requirements
    [Business Environment] Learn to find and plan for compliance requirements such as regulations, data protection, safety, ethics and organisational policy, track them, and respond when non-compliance is found.
39. Level 39: Change Control in Predictive, Agile and Hybrid Work
    [Business Environment] Learn how integrated change control works through impact analysis, a change control board and baseline updates, and how agile teams absorb change through the backlog and the product owner.
40. Level 40: Removing Impediments and Managing Issues
    [Business Environment] Learn to find, track and remove impediments and issues using an issue log, an impediment board and escalation thresholds, acting within your own authority before escalating.
41. Level 41: Risk I: Identifying and Prioritising Risks
    [Business Environment] Learn how to plan risk management and to find, record and rank threats and opportunities, using a risk register in predictive work and a risk-adjusted backlog in agile and hybrid work.
42. Level 42: Risk II: Quantitative Analysis and Response Strategies
    [Business Environment] Learn to measure risk exposure with expected monetary value and decision trees, size contingency and management reserves, and choose the right response strategy for threats and for opportunities.
43. Level 43: Risk III: Monitoring, Triggers and Risk Ownership
    [Business Environment] Learn to monitor risks through the life of the project: watching triggers, carrying out agreed responses, handling secondary and residual risks, and showing risk trends with risk burndown charts and team reviews.
44. Level 44: Continuous Improvement: Lessons Learned and OPAs
    [Business Environment] Learn to gather lessons learned throughout the project rather than only at the end, run useful retrospectives, and turn the findings into updated organisational process assets.
45. Level 45: Supporting Organisational Change
    [Business Environment] Learn to assess how ready an organisation is for the change a project brings, plan for people to adopt the outcome, and deal with resistance so that the benefits last after handover.
46. Level 46: Responding to Changes in the External Environment
    [Business Environment] Learn to scan for market, regulatory, economic, technology and social changes outside the project, judge how they affect scope, value and the business case, and send them to the right decision-makers.
47. Level 47: Scenario Context: Sustainability in Projects
    [Business Environment] Apply what you have learned about compliance, risk, stakeholders and change to scenarios where environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments, reporting duties and sustainable choices affect project decisions.
48. Level 48: Scenario Context: AI on Projects
    [Business Environment] Apply what you have learned about governance, compliance, risk and ethics to scenarios where AI tools support project work or form part of the product, with attention to data privacy, bias, accuracy and human oversight.
49. Level 49: Business Environment Integrated Scenario Review
    [Business Environment] Practise multi-step scenarios that combine governance, compliance, change control, impediments, risk, continuous improvement, organisational change and external change, and spot the distractor patterns typical of this domain.
50. Level 50: Final Mock Exam (Timed: 60 Questions, 77 Minutes) Timed mock
    [All domains] A timed mock exam that tests situational judgement across the People, Process and Business Environment domains, using predictive and agile or hybrid scenarios in proportion to the July 2026 outline, with a pass mark of 70%.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

Start free →