After the Exam
Once you’ve completed the exam, either by choice or your time’s run out, your exam score will be calculated. This can take just a few moments but you’ll pretty much know right away if you’ve passed the exam or not. Once you pass, you’re certified as a PMI-RMP.
This also starts the beginning of your three-year certification cycle. During these three years, you’ll have to accrue 30 professional development units (PDUs). A PDU is analogous to a continuing education hour, but there are some special ways to earn PDUs. Training is the most obvious approach, but you can also do volunteer work, contribute to the project management knowledge base, and even your ongoing work can get you a few PDUs.
It’ll be interesting over the next year to see how PMI promotes this certification. It’s a relatively new certification and there aren’t many statistics as to how many PMI-RMPs exist. Is it a risky certification? Maybebut it could be a positive risk for those project managers wanting to add credentials behind their name.