Project Management Professional (PMP)® Examination

The Project Management Professional (PMP) examination is a comprehensive, competency-based assessment that measures a candidate's ability to lead, deliver, and optimize projects across diverse environments and methodologies. The exam maps to three interrelated domains: People, Process, and Business Environment. The People domain emphasizes interpersonal leadership skills required to form, empower, coach, and motivate teams; it tests conflict resolution, stakeholder engagement, virtual team management, mentoring, and emotional intelligence. The Process domain focuses on delivery mechanics and includes planning and controlling scope, schedule, budget, quality, procurement, risk, communications, and change. It also examines how to select and apply appropriate project approaches—predictive, agile, or hybrid—integrate planning activities, ensure knowledge transfer, manage artifacts and governance, and execute to deliver business value incrementally. The Business Environment domain addresses compliance, benefits realization, and the ability to identify and respond to external influences on project scope and organizational change. Together these domains reflect both technical project controls and the leadership and contextual judgment required to achieve organizational outcomes. The examination assumes baseline professional experience: documented months leading and directing projects and at least 35 contact hours of formal project management education (with specified exceptions). Test design follows psychometric best practices and includes scored and pretest items to ensure ongoing validity and reliability. The exam balances questions across approaches—about half predictive and half agile or hybrid—so candidates must demonstrate familiarity with multiple delivery models and the judgment to select methods appropriate to project complexity and stakeholder needs. Cross-cutting themes appear throughout: governance and compliance with regulatory, safety and quality requirements; risk management and ethical decision-making; continual assessment of value and benefits; and processes for assuring knowledge continuity and quality of deliverables. The assessment evaluates both factual knowledge (terminology, standards, methods) and higher-order competencies (analysis, synthesis, situational judgment, and leadership) required to initiate, plan, execute, monitor and close projects successfully within organizational constraints.