How to Earn PDUs While Working? Professional Development Unit

Certification enhances your professional and personal growth. Gaining a PMP certification is actually the beginning of your professional learning. Professional development units, often known as PDUs, are required for all PMI certifications to be updated with recent practices. PDUs are used to analyze ongoing progress in the project management industry. You need to maintain a certain number of PDUs to keep your Project Management Professional (PMP) certification active. PDUs can be obtained by taking classes or attending courses. “How to earn a PDUs?” This is a common query that pops up among all the Project Managers with PMP certification.

Well, in this blog we’ll discuss in detail how to earn PDUs while working.

Table of Contents

1) Choose the Right PDUs

2) Gaining PDUs at Work: Education

3) Giving back to the Profession PDUs

4) Conclusion

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Choose the Right PDUs

In brief, Professional Development Units (PDU) are about the time you allocate for education to help others or volunteer for an hour. You can maintain your certification status with PMI by keeping a track of your records during your certification cycle.

The Project Management professional-based certification requires different PDU numbers for maintaining the certification. Most of the certifications are of 3 years renewal period such as,

a) Project Management Professional (PMP),

b) Program Management Professional (PgMP)

c) Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)

d) PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)

e) MI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP)

f) PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)

Certain Agile-based certifications like PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) will have their review cycle once a year.

The PDUs Classified into Two Groups, Education and Giving Back to Profession

1) Education PDUs can be obtained through professional training sessions, webinars, workshops, or even independent study.

2) Giving Back to Profession PDUs are earned for time spent participating in professional organisations, mentoring colleagues, and more.

There are many Continuing Certification Requirements CCR requirements, depending on your credential. For PMPs, there is a minimum of 35 PDUs in education and a maximum of 25 PDUs in giving back. To be more specific, you must obtain 8 PDUs in technical project management, 8 PDUs in leadership, and 8 PDUs in strategic and business management, which are divided up into several PMI Talent Triangle domains. So wisely, choose your PDU category.

Gaining PDUs at Work: Education

The prerequisite for gaining an Education PDU at work is to abide by PMI Talent Triangle. They are working ways, power Skills and strategic and business management. Classroom or online training both ways count for education PDU. 1 PDU = 1 hour of learning.

When you are ready with this, you can earn Education PDUs in the following ways.

International Events

Meetings and gatherings unite the community that includes keynote addresses, workshops, etc. (7–50 PDUs or more)

Local Events

Local events are frequently organised at PMI chapters and offer excellent networking opportunities. (1-2 PDUs)

Digital/Online Media

Education is carried out by using the resources ProjectManagement.com and Online on-demand courses

Reading

PMI Books and ProjectManagement.com are the reading resources of PMI

Informal Learning

This allows you to obtain PDUs by participating in educational activities like mentoring or "lunch and learn" events.

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Giving back to the Profession PDUs

This style is apparently different from the education model we checked earlier. In this category, if you’re a Project Manager then you can easily gain 8PDUs/ cycle. Other ways to earn Giving Back PDUs at work are mentioned below.

Create Contents

To work on your certification, you can create blogs, and articles or post and share them with your colleagues. For example, you can write on project progress in project management and share them through an internal channel with your co-workers.

Presentation

Generally, Project Managers do a lot of presentation. So, you can take this as a chance to present your PMP journey and other processes involved in it.

Knowledge sharing

You can also volunteer as a mentor and support your colleagues. Share your knowledge on your tackling projects and support junior project managers with Knowledge training.

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Conclusion

Now, you would have an idea of how easy it’s to earn PDUs at work for free. It may consume some of your work hours, yet it's manageable. Plan your PDU, and work on it now and then, because as a PMP you need 60 PDUs for 3 years. This would a headache if you're rushing at the end.

Hope this blog helps you in highlighting how to earn PDUs while working. Start working on your PDU now. Good Luck!

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