I made a deal with my employers, they’d provide me time and funding and I’d pass some project management training to help with task related to that role.
I’ve been doing project managment for years already and it’s a subject I am confident in. The course was easy for me since I found one geared towards my learning style.
But I got too confident and suggested I could pass the certification exam. I havnt had an exam since high-school and I did pretty badly at those.
The problem is that the questions are mostly scenerio based and I am taking things too literally, focusing on the wrong detials, or considering things from the wrong perspectives. It’s driving me crazy because I know what I am doing and I have a lot of pressure to succeed, but this poorly written exam could prevent me from achieving it.
Does anyone else have this issue or know any preparation resources I could use to help me intrupet these things better?
You must log in or register to comment.
Does anyone at work actually care if you pass or not? It sounds like taking the exam was more your idea than a job requirement. In that case, maybe the pressure you’re feeling is mostly self-imposed… Like maybe it’s fine if you demonstrate in some other way that you made good use of the funding and time for training, but just couldn’t pass the poorly-written exam.
I think it’s possible to set expectations like “wow I really benefitted from this course, and I’m looking forward to applying what I learned at work… But you wouldn’t believe how clumsy the exam questions are. I’m going to give it a shot, but tbh if I don’t pass the first time, I think I’d rather just forget about the cert instead of wasting energy chasing it. What do you think?”
Of course you still want to give it your best shot and learn how to solve this sort of thing, but hopefully you can do it from a place of confidence and desire for growth… not a place of terror, lol.
P.S. I dunno if this is helpful or not, but I think sometimes they make certification exams obtuse on purpose so that you’re not likely to pass the first time… Especially when they’re like $150 a pop. They want it to appear like a high standard, but it’s hard to do that in a fair way, so they settle for badly articulated moon logic.
You can usually find practice tests online for most certifications. If you have any coworkers who have passed ask them. I’m an advanced optician and just dragged one of my (untreated ADHD) coworkers through passing her abo exam. Having someone who knows what will be on the test is more useful than trying to memorize every aspect that might be there.
Best advice IMO-- Practice tests build your intuition for the real thing, even if the intuition is dumb, lol. But yeah you just gotta reverse-engineer how you’d arrive at the right answer from the question… Which can still be hard.
Practice tests. These exams are designed to trip you up so you have to learn the methodology they use to create the questions as much as the material itself. Unfortunately I don’t have better advice I’m not great at certification exams either. I just know practice tests got me through what flashcards and studying the material couldn’t.
