Well done on becoming a PMP® certified practitioner! Wear your badge with pride as I know it was a big effort to achieve. Because of this effort, we all want to maintain this PMP certification for as long as we can. The good news is that this is relatively painless if you stay engaged in the profession of Project Management.
To keep your PMP certification active, you need to gain 60 Professional Development Units (PDUs) across a three year cycle. 1 PDU = 1 hour of effort.
So how do we achieve this?
Easy – there are many ways to claim PDUs.
The PDUs earned are split across the following two categories:
- For Education, you need a minimum of 35 PDUs as follows;
- 8 PDUs across each section of the PMI Talent Triangle – Ways of Working (formerly Technical Project Management), Power Skills (formerly Leadership) and Business Acumen (formerly Strategic and Business Management)
- A further 11 PDUs across any of the above categories
- For Giving Back, there is a maximum of 25 PDUs as follows;
- 8 PDUs simply by working in Project Manager
- Up to 18 through other means.
Below are a variety of options to explore; 
- Education
- Training Courses – I.e. Instructor-led delivery
- Organisation meetings – I.e. PMI Branch Meetings
- Online media – I.e.Webinars, e-learning videos
- Reading a book – I.e. Plenty of material here!
- Informal Learning – I.e. Mentoring/Coaching/On-topic lunches
- Giving Back
- Being a Project Manager
- Creating Content – I.e. Books, blogs, articles webinars, presentations
- Giving a presentation – I.e. delivering some form of PM related information
- Share knowledge – I.e. Being the mentor or teacher
- Volunteer – I.e. With PMINZ or other community groups, offering PM related services
For more details on the above please review the following;
My advice is to log your PDUs throughout your three year cycle, rather than doing this all at the end. If you cannot log all 60 PDUs by the end of your three year certification cycle, you will be placed in Suspended Status. This provides you with a 12-month grace period to enter your PDUs, however you cannot advertise that your are a PMP certified practitioner during this time.
To check the current status of your certification and to submit PDUs, log into https://ccrs.pmi.org/ and view your certification Dashboard.
After your PDU quota has been submitted and approved by PMI, it will cost you US$60 to renew your certification for another three years.
Best of luck with your certification and your projects!
Mike.
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