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?
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.