PMP certification: Boost your career and earn more money

Chris Sienko: Hello and welcome to today's installment of the Cyber Speak with InfoSec Institute podcast. Each week we aim to bring you new and informative information, security training, and security awareness topics in a variety of formats. This week we're presenting a recent webinar hosted by InfoSec Institute entitled How to Boost Your Career and Earn More With a PMP Certification.

As you probably know, the project management professional certification is considered the gold standard in the industry for project managers that want to distinguish themselves from their colleagues. Today's speaker is InfoSec instructor Chris Danek, who will be discussing career opportunities for PMP holders, exam strategies that will help you when taking the PMP, and tips on how to prepare for the exam with a PMP bootcamp. Without further ado, please welcome Chris Danek.

Chris Danek: So today, yes, I want to cover a why you should get your PMP. I want to talk about some of the career opportunities that you'll get, the benefits of having the PMP certification as well as some tips for PMP exam success if you're a little bit further along in that process. And we'll talk a little bit about the bootcamp today.

So the first thing is why should you get the PMP? It is an important career designation for myself. I think that you'll find that more important than the designation is the knowledge within. PMPs can be found not just in project management but in a wide variety of of of roles. Your CTO, your CFO, your IT directors, project managers, QA directors, even CEOs tend to have these designations. And more important than that I find that having the information here is really important in being successful in those roles. It's like Kristin said, it's more than just being organized. It's kind of following a plan and following a pattern for success when it comes to building projects and executing projects.

So let's talk about what the PMP is. PMP, Project Management Professional, is an industry recognized certification. It's governed by the PMI Project Management Institute. And I think that there's close to a million certified project managers globally. It's a very big community. I'm sure you've run into opportunities that are asking for PMPs, or seeing other PMPs in your travels. So drop outlook is very good. This industry project management is growing very fast. I think the PMI estimates that over 50% of the worldwide GDP is spent on projects. So 50% of every single dollar across the world is spent on some sort of project development.

So as I mentioned, there's many different roles that a PMP certified professionals take on. Like I mentioned, in my experience, the PMP designation can be really be used a wide variety of roles. It's the knowledge that's important in here. So let's talk about what a project manager does. And more importantly than that, what is a project? A project is the application of resources, whether it's finance or human, to achieve a goal. The important part about a project is, according to the PMI, a project has a start and an end. It has concrete goals, concrete deliverables. There's lots of different projects. One of the difficulties in studying for the PMP exam is that the processes that you'll study, the application of knowledge is very generalized. So you might say, "Oh, I don't really understand what this does yet, but you'll find that these processes are kind of a good formula for building any of your projects in any of your industries."

So what are some examples? We might want to create a project to manage a new product launch. We might say, "Okay, this product has been in development for several years, and now it's time to roll out our new software, our new car, our new product, and we might want to create a project around launching that successfully." So who are the right stakeholders? Who are the right people that we're going to be delivering this product to? How do we manage that life cycle and what are the risks associated with it? How do we do that well?

Another project might be the implementation of a new system. Here in Canada, there's a payment system called a Firebird, I believe, or Phoenix, which is having some major problems. And the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get this product updated. That's a very big project. We'd call that a mega project, and you need to do that successfully ... In order to do that successfully, you need to sort of plan that and execute that in a concrete fashion rather than just kind of getting in there and installing new software on hundreds of machines. Another project might be to implement a new process or a new procedure. I'm sure many of you have experienced this before. You have some procedure or process or policy that's just broken. It's not working for the company. A miniature project might be to deploy a new procedure, whether that's the HR vacation request procedure. By doing this in a rigorous fashion and actually wrapping it in the constraints of a project, you might achieve that procedure more successfully. You might talk to the right people, make sure that their needs are met.

You might plan for the risks, plan for the training, document the material, have a planned rollout. I'm sure you've been a privy to processes where it's not rolled out very well and nobody knows what's going on and just sort of happens. The management of cross functional teams is also a project. When we have cross functional teams achieving a common goal, we need to make sure that the project manager involved in that is communicating the knowledge from one side to the other so that everything gets done properly. Government funded projects are what people typically think of when it comes to projects. These are large projects, building highways, bridges, public infrastructure. And a lot of times these projects are done very well, and sometimes they're done very poorly. And when it comes to taxpayer money, it's important that they're done well and done on budget and on schedule.

A similar sort of thing, managing projects in the public sector. So municipalities often have very large projects that are very important. And again, it's critically important that those, those projects are done on schedule and on budget. That's a big thing in project management.

So why should you get to the PMP? Well, the most obvious reason is it would increase your earnings potential. So on the screen here we have some example salaries of various roles with PMP designations. Frankly, having a PMP designation is going to increase the amount of your earn. If that's a good enough reason, that's a big deal for a lot of companies. They know that somebody who's gone through the project management professional certification track is going to have the experience is going to naturally command that salary.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the bootcamp. The important part about the bootcamp is that you're going to get a very hands on exposure to this knowledge. Jarrod's going to talk a little bit more about it in detail here, but the reason that you want to go through the bootcamp is so that you get certified on your first attempt. It is a rather long process. I don't want you to be too scared of all the details and all the things that you need to do, but the benefits is what you should be thinking about. Nothing comes cheap in this world. You sort of have to work for them and work hard at them. And the benefits of this should be rather clear. You're not just passing the certification so you can forget the knowledge and have this a PMP after your name. You're really learning this knowledge so that you can become a better employee. You can become a better project manager. Obviously, I mentioned that the learning skills, getting hired earn more is all a benefit of the certification. But more important than that, the PMP does ... Excuse me. The PMI does a pretty good job of incorporating new knowledge so that you can stay relevant.

The newest edition of the PMBOK guide just came out. It's the sixth edition, and they include a lot of information about Agile development. Agile, for those of you who are involved in software development, is a different methodology of achieving the project goals. The old method or the more traditional method of project management is typically called Waterfall development, where you just kind of go through each stage of development one by one to ensure that everything's complete before you start the next version or the next step phase of your project. Agile development is much more just in time you say, "Okay, well we're going to develop just enough of the requirements before we move on to the development. We're going to do just enough of the development to move on to the testing," because requirements change in software changes. So the PMI has done a pretty good job of including this knowledge in the latest edition and they do a very good job of helping you to stay relevant when you might have your head down and just be focused on the work that your company is doing.

So again, why get PMP certified? The earnings potential is very clear. It's well supported. Like I mentioned, there's nearly a million PMP professionals worldwide, and frankly just having that designation demonstrates that you've got the experience and the knowledge to be a more successful project manager. Even if you're not applying for a job as a project manager, being able to demonstrate that you can finish projects on budget or that you know how to create a good budget and create a good schedule is a very important thing. I would estimate that nearly a third to a half of the project management materials focuses on how to build a budget and how to build a schedule.

A lot of times the way we sort of informally create budgets and schedules is just try and numerate all the things that will cost money and all the hours that we think it'll take and put them on a spreadsheet and call that budget. That's successful for smaller projects, but larger projects it might start to fall apart if things go sideways, and things always go sideways. Changes happen, people take longer than expected. There's kind of just a number of things that can go sideways in a project, and a good project manager will, will go through that process of risk management and figure out how likely is it that some of these things will go wrong and then incorporate those values back into their budgets and schedules. So that's a really important part of the PMP certification and that's why the PMP is so valuable to employers, because project managers will be able to give an accurate budget and a range as well.

So let's talk a little bit about the exam prerequisites. I'll talk more about the process from start to finish, but the important part to know is that there's two tracks for the exam prerequisites. One is if you have a high school degree or a diploma or an associate's degree, and this requires a bit more experience in terms of project management experience before you can apply for the certification and take the test. The second track is if you have a degree already, they only care about a bachelor's degree. You don't have to have your MBA or anything like that. And if you have that experience then you only need 4,500 hours of experience.

The exam is broken down into five subject matter areas, or domains, and this is how it's broken down. You'll cover this a lot more in your training with the PMP, but the important part is that planning and executing the project of nearly 50% of the exam materials. So like I mentioned, creating the budget, sticking to the budget, sticking to the schedule, tracking that schedule, adjusting that schedule, managing the change, really the budget and the schedule tend to be the major parts of project management. There are 13 parts overall, but those tend to be the major ones.

So the exam format is basically it's a multiple choice exam. You get to take this exam at Prometric testing centers. There are 200 questions and it does ... They do give you four hours. I think I finished mine in about two, two and a half hours. So they give you quite a bit of extra time there. But there's 200 questions and they are multiple choice and many of them are, like I mentioned several times already, a lot of them concern subject matter of budget and scheduling. So they'll say, "Okay, well if you've built three houses at $1 million each and you expect to create nine houses, what's your CPI? What's your SPI? What's your cost variance? Your expected value or your actual cost? When do you expect to be complete?" And so on and so forth. Some of these questions are very simple and kind of intuitive. If I've created three houses in three months at a million dollars each and I want to create nine houses, I expect that I'll be done in nine months as expected.

But if I've created three houses at a four million dollar outlay in three months, well what does that mean? Does that mean I'm on time, behind time, on budget, behind budget? And studying the guide and going through the exam course will teach you all of those things. The other thing to note here is that there's no official passing score. They do this based on what they call a psychometric analysis. On top of that, it's not exactly obvious to you as a test taker, which questions are contributing to your score and which might be test questions. A lot of times what the PMI does is they sprinkle their exam with questions that are just meant to see how successful that question is.

So for example, they might say, "Okay, well here's some new question and 100% of people who took this test got this question correct. Well, maybe it's too easy. So in a future version, we're going to make this one a little bit harder." So as such, because so many people have taken this test and they have such a deep knowledge of how successful these questions are, the exam is quite hard. You will get questions that are very difficult and many people have gotten wrong in the past. So this is certainly not an easy exam, but I think that if you apply yourself well and study the subject material, that the questions will be difficult but achievable.

So I've got some exam tips for you. The most important is create a plan. This is a very good project manager guide, guideline. Create a plan for everything you do. And the same applies to this exam. The exam materials, the PMBOK guide is ... I've got it right on my desk here. It's quite thick. There's a lot of material here. The good part about it is it's written by project managers. It's very well organized, very easy to find what you're looking for. But if you don't have a plan and just say, "Okay, well I'm going to kind of sit down and read through this book and maybe I'll take a course and maybe I'll take the exam in a year," then you're going to find yourself with a week to go for the exam and be frantically cramming. Maybe that works for you. It doesn't work for me. There's a lot of material here and it's important to sort of come up with a plan. Create some milestones or some deadlines for yourself. It's very helpful.

I also would not start with the PMBOK guide. If you just try and open this guide and read it, it's very dry. It doesn't contain a lot of examples. It's more important that you find somebody who's got the PMP certification or take an exam course with an RSP, that can can tell you how these processes are applicable to your company or your job. If you have a specific question, they might say, "Okay, well this process is good or this will get this." Or you might say, "Here at my company, we do this brainstorming session, what would that be an example of?" And they can say, "Okay, well that's an example of a requirements gathering session combined with a scope definition session." And those processes are important to know and it's important to know the terminology that the PMI uses.

So that kind of brings me to my next point is that joining a community or enrolling in a course will be the best way for you to get answers to those questions, and get the practical experience. The thing about all of the processes that are in the PMI and the PMP certification is that it's very difficult to think about those things very generally, and it's far easier to learn this if you can say, "Oh, okay, we do that. I know exactly what that process is, here's how we do it in my company." And that will help you retain that knowledge and help you be able to apply that knowledge when you're asked for it in the future and when you see it on the exams.

Very important to take practice exams. I took between nine and 13 exams. I think the course that I had offered when I took this several years ago had 13 exams available to me. I believe that I took nine of them. You will get questions on these exams that you say, "Gosh, I don't remember reading about this anywhere." You read through the question. Good practice exams have details and references of the exact answers to them and you'll learn probably the most, you'll retain the most by taking that exam. You'll learn a great deal by going through the course and taking good notes and interacting strongly. But it's until you get to the exams, you won't really retain everything that you need to. And then the obvious thing. Be well rested, know where your exam is, show up early. Those are always good tips.

So like I mentioned, I think that the important parts from the PMP exam are that you want to apply cost and quality to your projects. So you'll learn how to successfully apply your team. How to apply your budget in order to achieve that project within a schedule. Importantly, you'll also be able to plan for that. A lot of times we might say, here's a project, here's the work that's in front of us, let's just start doing the work. And often that works well if you've got a good mental map of things but often it doesn't work well and you say, "Okay, we're ready for our product launch. Oh my gosh, we forgot to notify the marketing team." The marketing team has to create their own assets and their own launch schedule and suddenly you've tacked on another week and created a lot of stress and hopefully not too much, but some dissent in the company because you haven't managed that project well and you haven't planned that. So that's a really important thing that you'll gain from learning these processes.

You'll learn a broad range of skills across social cultural dimensions. What that means is you'll learn to be more receptive to different ways of doing things. You can establish ground rules and you can say, "Look, punctuality is important. This might not be a cultural norm worldwide." I work with a lot of people around the world and you learn that there are things that myself as North American kind of value and there are things that are less valuable to other people. So you learn to be receptive to that and to understand kind of what choices you should make when it comes to other cultures, other locations around the world and how to respect those appropriately. Obviously you will get a comprehensive understanding of the PMBOK guide. These knowledge areas and processes are very important. You can apply them ... I apply them every single day of my job as a project manager.

And then most importantly, if you take the exam course, you'll learn how to pass the exam on the first try. Very important. I don't think anybody wants to take a four hour, 200 question exam multiple times. So I think that it's important to do the best you can going through the training courses and be prepared to pass that exam on the first try, and I think that you'll be able to do so.

So I said I think a great deal here. I think with that I'll turn it back over to Kristin who wants to introduce you to Jarrod.

Kristin Zurovitch: Sure. Thanks so much Chris. Lots of good insights there. Obviously your practical experience and hands on work as a project manager certainly has lent itself to your comments here, and I appreciate that. As Chris mentioned, one of the important things about preparing for that certification is have a solid foundation in the form of whether it's a course and/or exam test prep. And Jarrod's here. Jarrod is our director of sales for InfoSec Institute, and he's going to share a little bit more detail about the actual PMP bootcamp that we offer. While he's doing that, I will queue up all the questions that you've been submitting and we will circle back with Chris after Jarrod short comments and take your questions.

Jarrod Mayes: All right, thanks for the introduction Kristin, and thank you Chris for all the great information. I appreciate you all taking the time to attend, and I just wanted to share a little bit of information about us and kind of how we offer the course. You know, I could come up here and tell you just about how great we are, but I think it's better for kind of our students to convey that to you.

So you can see here we, we've been rated five out of five stars by over 650 plus students. We've been teaching PMP for a long time. We have one of the highest pass rates in the entire industry, and I think a lot of the a lot of that can be attributed to the next bullet point. We are one of the only programs that allow you to take the exam on the fifth day of class. Something that's unique about the PMP exam is really all the requirements that go into it. I always tell people if you've got the required experience, you still have to satisfy that 35 hour requirement in order to submit your application. Once your application's submitted you go through a review process. Once that review process is done, hopefully you don't go through an audit. If you don't go through an audit, you're good to go to take that exam. The problem that presents itself is, by attending a boot camp, the whole purpose of a bootcamp is to access your short term memory. And studies have shown that two weeks after a bootcamp your short term memory, 50% of it is gone. So if you take a bootcamp and then hope to get your application submitted, that usually takes about a week. Then you hear back from PMI. Sometimes it can be two to three weeks before you actually get a chance to take that exam.

That was a problem that we really wanted to fix. So what we do is basically as soon as you enroll with us, we get pre-study books sent out to you. We get that PMBOK sent out to you. We give you access to skillset.com, which is our partner site that basically gives you exam questions and allows you to see just how ready you are to take the exam. But we also give you access to 35 hours of direct project management video. And the reason we do that is it satisfies that 35 hour requirement. So that way you can go ahead and submit your application, kind of get all your ducks in a row, get approved to take that exam.

And when you attend the bootcamp you're kind of worry free. You're not worrying about, "Oh, am I going to be approved to take this exam? Am I taking this bootcamp for no reason?" You know ahead of time that you're going to jump into this bootcamp, you're going to attend four days, and on that fifth day you're ready to take your exam. And I think that lends a lot to our high pass rates. We are one of the most awarded project management training companies. I kind of refer to us as a one stop shop for project management. If you want to become certified and you've got the experience necessary, we will provide you everything else you need. A lot of other vendors are kind of a la cart. They'll provide you with the training, you buy the exam separate, our course is a package. It includes everything that you need.

And just to kind of show how seriously we take the educational aspects of our training and we actually care about kind of our students progressing. Once you complete our PMP bootcamp you're certified, everything is good, then you've got to start worrying about the continuing education requirements. Getting those PMI PDUs. What we do for our students is we actually include, for free, a Microsoft project course. It's just a miniature online course that we provide to you for after class. And what that does is it gets you started on those continuing education units. So it actually counts for up to 8.5 PMI continuing education units. And that's free of charge. We just want to make sure that once you're certified you're started off in the right path. And we do have a bunch of flexible course formats because we want to make sure that we've got something for everyone. Not everyone has the same schedule.

So if we want to go to the next slide. So we offer in-person boot camps. So basically you can attend any one of our 12 locations around the United States, and it's a great option for people who want that in person experience, want to shake hands with the instructor and want to do a little bit of commingling with their colleagues. The other option, which is actually our most popular option, about 70% of our students are doing it this way, is we offer the training live online. The benefit of the live online training is you're live, you're remoting into one of our 12 locations. So let's say for example, you live in California, but you want to participate in DC. You can remote into that class. You've got two way audio, two way video. You can speak with the instructor, all your questions are answered, you can hear the instructor answering questions from the class, all the books, course-ware materials are the same. The only real difference is you're not there to shake the instructor's hand. So most of the time ... I always make a joke, unless you've got a zeal for hoagie style sandwiches in hotel conference rooms, your best bet is probably with the live online.

But there are those people who can't take time off work to attend the live bootcamp. So what we offer for those folks is a mentored online course. A mentored online is basically just a previously recorded instructor led training that we give you 24 hour access to for four months. You can kind of take things at your own pace. So if you want to work through the evenings or do some work on the weekends, you can do that. We do give you access to a live instructor. So that way if you run into a snag or you need help, you've got somebody there who can help you kind of work your way through things.

All of these courses come with exam vouchers, and the onsite enterprise training is one particular thing. So let's say for example, you've got a big group of people at your work and you've got a lot of times, let's say for example, you work for a large company and you're going out to bid on a project. Part of the project requirements is that everyone who's taking part in this project needs to be PMP certified. Sometimes they can put things in a bit of a snag because studying for a PMP can take a long time. What we do is we'll send an instructor onsite to your organization. If you've got 10 students, we'll bring the instructor out and make sure that we run everyone through the exact same quality training that we provide to our in-person students, and we'll go ahead and get everyone certified so that way you can meet your deadline requirements and you guys can win that bid. But that's a couple of ways that we offer it.

The way the classroom training works is it's four days of classroom training. The fifth day is strictly an exam day. So we want to make sure that everyone is aware that fifth day is entirely dedicated to tonight exam so that way you've got time to study and make sure you get your ducks in a row. We do include the PMP exam voucher with every one of our courses. It's included by default. We do provide you with the PMI membership so that way you can keep your knowledge and skills sharp even after the boot camp training. We do provide you with expert instructions. Chris is a great example of that. And like I said, we do include that 35 hours of self-paced video learning before class, not only to get your skills sharp but to also meet that requirement so that way you can get that application submitted beforehand.

We offer dynamic course ware with over 500 questions in the actual course ware itself in addition to skillset. So we do provide you with access to skillset.com which is our simulated testing engine that allows you to kind of see how ready you are to take this exam. And then we also, every single course that we offer comes with a free reset. So basically you can reset any one of the courses. Let's say you take it in person and you traveled out there and let's say ... Everybody has bad testing days. Let's say you didn't pass. You can retake the training either self-paced, live online, or in person as many times as you'd like up to a year, or until you're certified. Whichever comes first.

Well thank you everyone. I appreciate everyone kind of taking the time to listen.

Kristin: Good. Thanks for that Jarrod. Appreciate it. And Chris, if you want to join us again, we do have several questions that came in. We're closing in on our time, so I think we'll take as many as we can here. If we don't get to your question. No worries. We'll circle back to you and respond to you directly. The first question actually comes in from Jeff. It's a two part question that he asks. He's wondering about what constitutes viable project management experience and then secondly, what's the best way for him to track those experience hours?

Chris D: Sure. So a couple of notes that I glossed over pretty quickly here is in order to apply for the PMP designation and actually even to take the exam, you have to have that experience first. PMP asks for, as you remember on that previous slide, either 2,500 or 4,500 hours. You don't have to track every single hour you work on. If you say, "I would send this job and I would say 50% of my work was project management." Then they will say, "Okay, well based at 40 hours a week, 2000 hours a year, or 50% at six months, that's 500 hours." That's how they'll add up that time.

Also what constitutes a viable project management experience is really ... It's open to interpretation. I know that that's not a great answer for you, but basically anything that constitutes a project and anything that you help manage, whether that be you're running the project yourself and you have to manage your own tasks, that could maybe be considered a project, but more strongly will be if you have anyone working for you or you're helping to coordinate or direct a project ... One of the things people often find surprising is that EAs, executive assistants, often are involved in project management. If you're an EA who's taking care of the event coordination, making sure that various people are on site at a certain time, various marketing materials are distributed, all that, that's a project. So that that would qualify as project management experience.

I hope that answers your question. Feel free to follow up with the chat window if that wasn't quite what you're looking for.

Kristin: Good. Thanks Chris. I do have a question here from Linda. She asked, from your own experience, what areas of the exams do you see students finding the most challenging and do you have any advice for them to prepare for it?

Chris D: Yeah, what was very challenging for myself was actually the scheduling and budget formulas. That's because my management in the past was not concerned with that. It was generally how do we generate the requirements, pair that down to the scope and get it done. So scheduling and budgeting was a little bit new to me when I first took the exam. It depends on your experience. If you're involved in finance, well budgeting and maybe to a lesser extent, scheduling is probably going to be what you live and breathe on daily basis. So the exams, EVM, that's earned value management formulas will probably be very obvious to you and second nature. So as I mentioned, there's 10 separate subject areas and five domains of those subject areas. You're going to find challenging different areas based on your own experience.

Kristin: So Chris, circling back to the question you just previously answered about what constitutes these project management hours? William actually had a follow up to that and he's wondering, does owning your own business qualify?

Chris D: Absolutely. If you are produced ... Well let me put an asterisk next to that. The PMI separates projects from operations management. So if you own a business, say you're producing wine, the actual production of wine, the actual production and sale of kind of this ongoing operation would not qualify as a project. However, developing a new wine or deploying a new wine to your operations or running a marketing campaign to sell some wine, which is a fixed start and has a budget, has a schedule. Those would all be examples of projects.

Kristin: Very good. And I'll throw this out as a jump ball for either of you to take, but Scott is wondering what are the required steps for filling out my application?

Chris D: Maybe I could jump in, buzzer beat Jarrod here. The one thing I want to talk about, I'll segue into auditing with this. You first want to take a look at your background. Do you want to say, what is my experience? Do I have the appropriate number of hours before I can even apply to become a PMP professional. If you have those hours, then great, you're good to go. You can begin that process. If you don't have those hours, it's still okay to begin studying and to become aware of this. There's a lot of material here. I took nearly a year to study all of the material. I didn't have a very good plan when I first started and as I mentioned, I certainly found myself cramming a little bit in the last couple of months. But you sort of want to have plenty of time to look at your background before you apply.

When you do apply, there's a chance that you'll be audited. And auditing means that the PMI will follow up manually by hand. They'll call your references. They'll call people and say, "Hey, did Chris Danek work as a line manager at your wine factory and they'll verify that. So to that end, it's important that in your application you don't include every single detail of every single project you've ever been involved in, because that's just going to lengthen the audit process, and the audit happens automatically. When you hit submit on the PMI website, within 60 seconds you'll know if you're being audited. It's, it's kind of a scary process.

If you keep your history to the most relevant, most easily verifiable pieces of experience, then that will make that auditing process less painful. To answer the earlier question about is owning your own business a good example of project management experience? It absolutely is, but that might be a difficult to audit process. Who's your boss? Well I am. Who's your ... Who can verify this? No one, potentially. It's far easier to audit someone if that experience is easily verified.

Jarrod: Yeah, so a lot ... And if you don't mind, if I just jump in. So they'll ask you for your supervisor's name and they'll ... You can provide some contact methods. What they're going to want you to do is just calculate and add up the time and number of hours that you spent on each of the project management process groups. So initiating the project, planning the project, executing the project, controlling and monitoring, and then closing the project. And then they're just going to ask you for a brief description, about 500 characters of the project, the objectives, the deliverables, the projected outcome, and your personal role on the project. And you just do that for all the projects that you want listed on that application. So that's really what they're looking for.

Kristin: And do either of you have any thoughts or insights you can share with John, going back to the what constitutes project management hours. He indicates that he's served in the military. And how can someone who has served in the military demonstrate the necessary hours of experience?

Chris D: That's difficult unfortunately because I haven't served in the military. My hats off to you. I don't know what your average day would look like or your average month would look like. My best advice would be to speak to somebody individually and ask them, "Hey, does this constitute a project? Does this constitute project management experience?" The answer is usually it depends. I don't really, unfortunately, I'm sorry to say, I don't have a lot of experience with how PMI might interpret your, your tenure with military as project management experience.

Kristin: Good. It looks like we have time for one last question. This one I think is for you Jarrod. Edwin is asking how can interested persons who do not reside in the US benefit from Infosec's exam pass guarantee?

Jarrod: So we've got a couple of different options. Obviously you could travel here, but we also ... The live online, you can join that from anywhere in the world. We do have it in different time zones throughout the United States. So we could try and find a time zone that would better align with you. It might not be exactly a nine to five, but it is something that you could participate in remotely. Like I said, the live online would probably be your best option so that's one way you could go about doing that.

Chris S: Thank you for joining us for this week's episode. Remember, you can subscribe to our weekly podcast, Cyber Speak with InfoSec Institute, or by visiting our channel on YouTube. Just search for the InfoSec Institute YouTube channel to see all of our videos. If you like what you heard and you want to learn more about information security training and security awareness, please visit our website, InfoSecinstitute.com. We also have a blog which is updated every week with new articles, videos, and tutorials on topics ranging from project management to penetration testing, which can be found at resources.infosecinstitute.com. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you back here next week.