Introduction: This is the final part of my preparation for the PMP® Examination Application. More information on the PMP® exam preparation can be found at my PMP® exam journey here.

Your PMP® Application is being Audited

After having diligently filled all the required information on the online form and submitted the application, PMI states that it will take around 5 working days before sending you an email requesting you to log in your account and make payment. [NEW] If you are required an audit, PMI will immediately send you an audit email requesting you to complete the audit requirements in order to be eligible for paying the exam fee and taking the exam. Up till now, you still do not know whether your application will be selected for an audit or not. The requirement for an audit will only be revealed once you have made the payment!

Luckily or unluckily, I was termed by the PMI audit process as a Category One PMP® Candidates. The sub-heading of this paragraph is the first message I got after I have hit the payment button. As PMI would not disclose the probability of an audit, various sources have guessed that around 5%-25% (rough order of magnitude) of candidates are audited for US applicants while that for international applicants would be as low as 0.5% (and I am one of them). Greetings to PMI from Hong Kong!

PMP® Certification Audit Requirements

PMI will give every PMP® applicant 90 days to respond and complete to the PMI audit. Please take note that the “90-day period” is all the time you will have to successfully complete the PMI audit. You must make sure all the required documents were included in one package sent to PMI. PMI will not contact you for further information.

Category One PMP® Candidates are requested to:

Verifying Bachelor’s/equivalent university degree.

Verifying your Project Management Experience.

Verifying 35 contact hours of Project Management Education.

The first and last are no more than requiring you to prepare a photocopy of your certificates.

The second one would require you to print out all the experience records (PMI already did the hard work of putting your experience neatly into separate experience records as PDF files) and send them to your supervisors/managers for endorsement and signing. Each experience record and form should be put into a separate sealed envelope (also signed on the sealed flap). What if all the experiences were gained under the same supervisor? PMI is so considerate that (quoting PMI) “If one person is verifying multiple projects for the same company, they can fill out one form and initial or highlight on the Experience Record the projects that they are verifying”.

When these are ready, put all the documents into a large envelope and mail it back (better with registered mail) to PMI at:

PMI Global Operations Center

14 Campus Blvd., Newtown Square, PA 19073-3299 USA

It costs HKD$25.90 to send the document of 10 pages from Hong Kong to the PMI Center in the US for the PMP® audit.

It will take another week for PMI upon arrival of the package for verification. If everything is fine, PMI will send an email to you informing the result and ask you to further proceed to schedule the test. There are cases that PMI would request the candidate to supply more detailed descriptions of the projects they have undertaken, and fortunately this can be done through email.

From discussions in online forums, candidates requiring simple document audit are the most lucky ones amongst all PMI audit cases (of course it would be more fortunate if your application is not selected after all). It was rumored that PMI would require some candidates to have a chat session through video conferencing or even fly in person to the PMI headquarters for fact-to-face interviews.

Should one fail the audit, PMI would refund the application fee (less US$100 for administrative charge) and you are not allowed to submit PMP® application within one year.

Your PMP® application audit materials have been received

Just as I was still wondering whether PMI has received my audit materials, I received the following email from PMI to state that they have received the mail. It was about 11 days (including holidays) after I sent the mail to the post office here in Hong Kong. They state that they would need five more days to process the audit.

You have successfully completed PMI’s audit process for the PMP® credential

Strange enough, I got this PMP® audit success email just 1 minute after the email above. They have actually gone through my materials and given me a go for sitting the PMP® examination. Great! However, I wished they would have sent me the receipt acknowledgement email a bit earlier so that I could be assured of no loss during postage. I was checking the PMI website every day…

OK, time to make an appointment at Prometric for the PMP® examination!