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This movie will cover the required qualifications needed in order to apply for the project management professional certification. Part of what makes the PMP so noteworthy is the fact that holding the certification itself already demonstrates a minimum level of experience and background. There are three primary categories of qualification; educational background, project management experience and project management education. The level of experience required is different based on your highest level of education attained. If your highest level of education is either a high school diploma, Associate's Degree or the global equivalent of either, then you would need the following amount of experience; a total of 60 months or five years and a total of 7500 hundred hours. We'll review how to calculate the months and hours shortly, but I would like to point out that this experience must have been accrued within the past eight consecutive years. Even if you have a lot of experience, enough of this experience must fall within this timeframe in order to qualify. Next, you must have a total of 35 project management education hours, which PMI refers to as contact hours. Unlike the project management experience, there is no limitation as to when these hours were accrued; however, if your application is audited, you must be able to show proof. By the way, this course qualifies as contact hours. In a moment, we'll review contact hours in more detail. If you have obtained your Bachelor's Degree or the global equivalent, then the total number of required project management experience goes down. The requirements are now 36 months or three years and 4500 hours. As far as contact hours goes, that remains the same at 35. Now, several people tend to confuse how the calculation of months and hours works, so let's review. Here, PMI is looking for your experience in directing or leading project tasks. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to have led the entire project, but that at a minimum, they're looking for you to have headed project tasks. They also are looking for you to have experience in all five of the process groups. If you are not clear what these five process groups are, don't worry since we'll be covering them in detail within this course, but for reference, they are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing. I like to clarify that this doesn't mean that every project must have touched all of these five process groups, but that you have touched on all of the groups at some point during the project management experience that you noted on your application. Now, something important to note is that the months may not overlap. If I just confused you, don't worry because we'll clarify this looking at the next example. Here in this example we'll calculate the total number of month accrued during a one year period. As you can see, there are three projects that are overlapping. The first project occurred during the span of six months, the second three months and the third project lasted seven months. Take a brief moment to look at this example. How many months of experience do you calculate? If you came up with 16, you are incorrect. But don't feel badly because this is a mistake that most people make, which is adding the total number of months for each project. If you came up with ten, you are correct. In this example, our applicant participated in a project between March and December and this spans ten months. Now, let's review how to calculate the total hours of experience. While the total number of months may not overlap, hours can. Moving back to our example, let's assume that project one had a total of 720 hours worked, project two had 240 hours and project three had 640 hours. To calculate your total number of hours worked, you would simply add them up. Therefore, our example reflects 1600 hours of experience. As far as contact hours goes, I already mentioned that these have no specification as to how far back they can go. But just as a reminder, you must be able to show proof of having taken the class or course if your application is audited. As you can imagine, the content of the courses have to relate directly to project management. Each hour is calculated by total number of class hours. For example, an eight-hour course equals eight contact hours. PMI does specify where these contact hours may come from. Let's look at a list of acceptable sources. The first one here is PMI registered education providers, or REPs. These are training companies and or programs that have been reviewed by PMI and pre-approved to fulfill the contact hour requirements. Once you obtain your certification, REPs may also fulfill education credits that are required to maintain your status as a certification holder. These are called professional development units or typically just referred to as PDUs. But make sure you don't confuse these with contact hours. The reason that I'm bringing this to your attention now is that applicants tend to think of them as the same thing and therefore become confused that PDUs are another component of the qualification process. Again, you must only worry about contact hours. And REPs are typically identified by this symbol. PMI component organizations refer to PMI chapters, specific interest groups or any other event hosted by PMI. Employer or company-sponsored programs also qualify as contact hours. Training companies or consultants, such as the Virtual Training Company, also qualify and I mentioned earlier that this course does indeed qualify as contact hours. There are also distance learning companies and these typically will require an end-of-course assessment and project management related courses offered by a university or college.