As one of the leading project management certifications, you’ll have no doubt encountered the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification in your career. In 2022 PMI made changes and updates to how your Professional Development Units (PDUs) work.
These updates can have a practical effect on your recertification, and even if you’re new to the PMP, what you read when you started studying may now have changed. It’s important to understand how you’ll be affected.
To that end, we’re going to look at:
- What Professional Development Units are
- How PDUs changed in the 2022 PMI update
- The practical effect these changes will have on your certification
What are PDUs, and how do they help you get recertified?
As soon as you complete your PMP exam and receive your certification, you need to think about recertification. You have three years to complete a range of tasks – or PDUs – to continue being a PMP-certified project practitioner.
The clock starts ticking on your three years immediately, so you need to be ready to complete training and tasks. You need to earn a total of 60 PDUs over the three years to be able to remain a PMP.
There are two types of PDU:
- Education
- Giving back
In the education track, you need to work on the new PMO Talent Triangle, which also got updated at the same time as the PDU framework.
While the Talent Triangle changes have been mainly cosmetic, the same can’t be said for the way your PDUs work.
What changed with PDUs for the PMP certification?
The way you earn your PDUs hasn’t changed, but the mix of where your 60 PDUs every three years is now different.
We’ll look at the changes for each category.
Changes to Education PDUs
Of the 60 credits in your recertification cycle, you need to complete at least 35 education PDUs within the education category. With the rebrand of the Talent Triangle, there are different names for the focus of the education you complete.
You need to achieve a minimum number of points per triangle side, like this
- At least 8 PDUs for ways of working
- At least 8 PDUs for power skills
- At least 8 PDUs for business acumen
It’s then up to you how to achieve the rest of the PDU requirements for education.
Changes to Giving Back PDUs
Giving back relates to how you, as a professional in the field of project management, contribute to the industry ecosystem.
A major change to the Giving Back category is how many PDUs you can claim from your work in a PMO. “Working as a Professional” can now only account for eight of your PDUs. A maximum of 25 PDUs can come from this category, meaning now you have to earn 17 through volunteering or creating knowledge.
Previously, you could claim 15 PDUs from your hands-on project management, so this is a significant change. If your PMP recertification is due soon, you need to work on a strategy to earn sufficient points and register them in the Continuing Certification Requirements System (CCRS).
How do the changes to PDUs affect a PMP?
If you are a newly-minted PMP, you won’t notice anything different – you’ll only ever know these new requirements.
However, if you’re an established PMP and have a cadence and expectations for your recertification, you need to check where you’re up to. You may need to change up how you document your work and even the work you do – such as volunteering to run a project for a local charity.
You should have received communication from the PMI in mid-2022 explaining what you need to do with the PDU changes.
PDU updates to the PMP
Recertification for the PMP certification has changed. Updates to the balance of PDUs in the 2022 PMI changes will affect the mix of work and proof you offer when applying for your three-year PMP recertification.
