PMI-ACP® Certification Training

If you fail the exam on your first attempt, you can re-take it two more times within your one-year eligibility period. Fees are associated with re-examination. Details for re-examination can be found in the certification handbook.

All PMI exams, with the exception of the CAPM, are offered at approved Prometric Testing Centers worldwide.

When submitting an application, you do not need to send documentation. However, you will be required to send supporting documentation if your application is selected for a random audit. To find out more about PMI's audit process, refer to the certification handbooks and the audit FAQs.

No. No one certification serves as a prerequisite for another. You also do not have to be a PMI member to apply to become a certification holder. If you are already PMP® certified, the general project experience required for PMI-ACP® is waived off.

We would say so. It is often said that the PMI-ACP® Exam Prep Book by Mike Griffiths is almost the “official” study guide for the PMI-ACP® Exam. However, this book by Mike Griffiths is not a must read but highly recommended for any exam taker or even for knowledge seeker who has just started on Agile or a practitioner in Agile.

We also recommend using our study material specially designed for PMI-ACP along with Mike Griffiths book. The study material is designed for specific stages of your PMI-ACP® preparation. We provide the Slide Book on PMI-ACP®, Flash cards, Supporting Guide to fill your application, Pre-Assessment Software guide and most importantly, specially designed Mock exams to crack the PMI-ACP exam.

PMI provides PMBoK as their standard reference guide for PMP®. However, there is no guide or standard prepared by PMI for PMI-ACP®. What it provides is the PMI-ACP® Exam Reference Books (a total of 11 Agile books with over 3800 pages!) which is much thicker than the PMBoK® guide. What we recommend is one book which takes the relevant content from these 11 books

• RMC PMI-ACP® Exam Prep by Mike Griffiths

This is the most popular book on PMI-ACP. Fortunately, we are the exclusive distributors with RMC in this part of a region and we use this book to coach the participants.  All of our students have used this book and have received excellent results. The author Mike Griffiths is a renowned Agile trainer and practitioner who has help formulating the PMI-ACP® Exam structure and syllabus – who else could be more familiar with the PMI-ACP® Exam than this insider?

Yes. We hand hold the participant until he achieves the coveted PMI-ACP certification course. We provide Exam Form Filling assistance through our guided software. Our Expert reviewers and counselors are available to help with any queries the participants may have. We assist all participants with their Audit Process. In short, we hand-hold them in their journey to become PMI-ACP certified.

We believe in in-house instructors and that’s one of our differentiators. The in-house instructors are dedicated and exude passion in the training. The training delivery and the training methodology is what stands out for ProThoughts, claim our students. You can check the feedback reviews about our training here. You can check the Instructor Profile on the course page.

PMI-ACP® stands for Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner while CSM stands for Certified Scrum Master.

CSM (Certified Scrum Master)

Certified Scrum Master is a popular Agile certification
Understand the fundamentals, terminology, practices and principles, and roles of the Scrum methodology
For Scrum Master or Scrum Team Member in the IT/software industry

Requirements to get CSM

1. NO experience prerequisite;
2. need to attend a course on CSM;
3. take and pass the CSM exam, which has only 25 questions AND almost everyone can pass it
Very easy to get CSM

PMI-ACP® (Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner)

Popularity is growing over the several years since its introduction in 2011/2
The certification syllabus is more extensive
The PMI-ACP® Exam tests on everything about Agile, from Agile Manifesto, different Agile methodologies and frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, etc.) to Agile tools, techniques, skills, etc.
For everyone involved in Agile projects
e.g. project managers, product owners, Agile coaches and trainers, developers, testers, business analysts, etc.
Requirements to get PMI-ACP® certified:
1. A minimum number of hours of general project experience and Agile project experience;
2. 21 Contact Hours in Agile project education;
3. pass the PMI-ACP® audit of your application (if being selected);
4. take and pass the PMI-ACP® exam, which has 120 questions (lasts for 3 hours), it is not easy to pass the PMI-ACP® exam without over a hundred hours of hard work
5. Much more difficult to get PMI-ACP®

CSM vs PMI-ACP®

CSM is quite different from the PMI-ACP® certification. You may judge whether to get CSM or PMI-ACP® based on the comparison above.
If you work sole with Scrum and if your organization requires a certificate for your Scrum knowledge, then CSM is certification to go. However, if your team practice other Agile methodologies and if you would like to have an Agile certificate that’s rigorous and valuable, PMI-ACP® is your definite choice.
One word of caution is that since PMI-ACP® has just been around several years, quite a few HR practitioners may not be aware of its existence. You may need to explain the values of PMI-ACP® to them.

Actually, no one knows this. If anyone is suggesting any score for PMI based exam, we will doubt it.

The Project Management Institute does give any passing score nor they provide any information on the questions answered correctly. What they provide are just the grades. They are the following:

• Above Target — performance better than the average Aspirants
• Target — performance on par with average Aspirants
• Below Target — performance worse than the average Aspirants

This is because the PMI-ACP® Exam is based on ‘sound psychometric analysis’ (which is a modern way of keeping the standards of those who pass the PMI-ACP® Exam). Also, since most of the PMI-ACP® Exams are administrated on computers, the question sets of individual candidates are different, hence the passing scores for individual exams will need to be adjusted to the overall difficulty of the set, i.e. NOT the same.
However, according to the trainers of PMI-ACP® Agile Certification aspirants, most of them would estimate that the passing score is around 70%. This may be because the PMI-ACP® Exam is generally considered a bit easier than the PMP® Exam (but this is just an educated guess only as no information has been disclosed by PMI).

Therefore when you are attempting ProThoughts PMI-ACP® sample Mock Exams, it is highly recommended to set a higher standard than 70% (e.g. 75% – 80%) for your mock exam performance so that you can walk into the PMI-ACP® Exam center with better confidence of passing the exam in the first attempt.
As per our alumni who have passed both PMP® and PMI-ACP® Exams in their first attempt, we can claim that the PMI-ACP® exam is easier than the PMP®.

PMI-ACP encompasses the entire Agile framework which includes all the Agile methodologies including the Scrum. Further, the PMI-ACP is designed for Project & Program Managers, Product Owners, Scrum masters, Scrum Product Owners, Agile Coaches, Agile Trainers, Sr. Developers, Business and IT Managers with experience in Agile projects. General project experience is required in addition to Agile-specific experience and education. The exam is designed to test both the practitioner’s level of professionalism in Agile practices of project management and professional versatility in project management tools and techniques. You can learn about the pre-requisites here.
For Certified Scrum Master course, no eligibility is required as such. The CSM introduces to the world of Agile and helps you to learn the basic fundamentals, terminology, principles of Agile. However, CSM focuses only on the Scrum methodology.
education. The exam is designed to test both the practitioner’s level of professionalism in Agile practices of project management and professional versatility in project management tools and techniques. Prerequisite requirements for the pass/fail exam are broken down into three categories:

• Will the audit package be returned by PMI?
  No.
  Whether your PMI audit result is successful or not, PMI will not return the audit package to the PMP® / PMI-ACP® applicant. Therefore, only photocopies of the certificates are required by PMI instead of the original ones.
  PMI will need to retain the audit package according to its internal auditing procedures.
• What would happen if the PMI audit fails?
  First and foremost, the PMP® or PMI-ACP® candidate is not able to proceed with the certification application and examination. The certification fee paid will be refunded (with the subtraction of the processing fee).
  There may be some follow-up actions by the PMI depending on the cause of failure of the PMI audit:
  1) if the audit failure is due to incomplete information (including the documents are sent to PMI in more than 1 package), no action may be taken by PMI, but the candidate will only be able to reapply to the certification 1 year later;
  2) if the failure is due to fraudulent information, PMI may take disciplinary actions (including banning from application to PMI certification for life) to the candidate in question as PMI takes integrity very seriously.
  Therefore, when submitting the PMP® application / PMI-ACP® application, always make sure you are entering truthful information. Honesty is the best policy.
• Do I need to be the project manager / Scrum Master to apply for the PMI-ACP Exam?
  Not really.
  PMI-ACP is “Project Management Institute – Agile Certified Practitioner”. The key word is the Practitioner. As long as you are practicing Agile in your projects and any methodologies in Agile, you can be eligible for PMI-ACP®
  2,000 hours working on project teams as a member or project leader within the last 5 years
  1500 more hours working on Agile project teams / with agile methodologies within the last 3 years
  21 Contact Hours of Agile project management/practices training
  Further, you can play any role in Agile projects - you can be a developer, sponsor, product owner, business analysts, etc. as long as your projects are working on Agile methodology.
  If you happen to be a PMP®, the 1st requirement for the 2000 working hours will be automatically fulfilled. PMP Eligibility Requirements can be referred here.