PMI project management certifications offer a better salary, the common language among project managers, and an asset in the job market. You must retain your PMI certifications to have the several advantages of the reputable certifications. PMI requires certification holders to earn PMI PDU hours, and many PMI certified professionals look for Free PMI PDU options to renew their certification.
What Are The Free PMI PDU Options?
- Attend free a course related to project management
- Find and read free books or article about Project Management
- Attend a free webinar or conference online or in-person
- Organize or attend a casual or formal talk about project management with your project team or friends
- Create knowledge by writing articles or writing in the forums, etc.
- Volunteer by helping a nonprofit organization or by assisting someone in their exam preparation
- Work as a professional, i.e. involve in project management activities.
What Is PMI’s Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) Program?
Earning a PMI certification is quite an achievement and it boosts your potential in the job market. Earning a PMI certification requires hard work and commitment. Once you have passed your PMI certification exam, it doesn’t stop there. As part of PMI’s Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) program, you must maintain and renew your certification. And it is a mandatory requirement in order to keep your PMI certification active and valid.
The purpose of the Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) program is to support your ongoing professional and educational development while you hold the PMI certification. With the CCR program, you get a chance to broaden or enhance your project management skills. With this, you also involve yourself in activities where you use your skills to contribute to your profession. So, through the CCR program, you get a chance to share your knowledge and skills with others. You can also enrich your own skills and enhance your professional development in a variety of ways.
You can earn PDUs online with our PM courses. You can check out the number of PDUs provided by Master of Project Academy’s courses on the PDU list matrix.
What is PDU?
If you hold any of the PMI’s certifications, be it PMP, RMP, PBA, or others, you will need to maintain it and then renew it after every three years. The renewing of the certification is only possible if you have maintained the certification by earning the required number of Professional Development Units (PDUs) every year in the three-year renewing cycle.
Master of Project Academy offers Free PMI PDU Training bundle and earns you 4 PDUs for FREE. Enroll now!
The day you have passed your PMI certification exam, you can start earning PDUs. It is not necessary though to earn PDUs in each passing year. You may earn all the required PDUs in three years, two years or even all the PDUs could be earned in a single year.
How to earn PDUs?
There are many ways to earn PDUs. You could learn something new, create useful material, read something, or give back your experience or skills to your profession. These all options and more to earn PDUs will be explained in detail in this post. If you search on the Internet, you will find many materials as well as opportunities that you can utilize to earn PDUs. These include webinars, training, podcasts, conferences, etc. Some resources are available for purchase but you can also utilize free resources to earn the required PDUs.
You will find numerous types of free PMI PDU online materials on the Internet such as free short training, free conferences or webinars, etc. However, these free PMI PDU materials are not large or adequate enough to earn all the PDUs that you need. For example, you could find a free PDU webinar on the Internet, which would last only an hour. So utilizing this will only earn you 1 PDU. Similarly, you may find a free short training of 1 or two hours, which will only be worth 1 or 2 PDUs. So searching for and then utilizing many such free PDU resources is time-consuming and requires a lot of effort. Hence, the free PMI PDU option is good only to earn some PDUs that you may be short of.
The top 3 free PMI PDU resources
You can earn free PMI PDUs by doing any or all of these activities:
- Attend free PMI PDU Courses.
- Attend free PMI PDU Webinars/Podcasts.
- Free PMI PDU by Giving Back to Profession.
We will be describing these free PMI PDU options in detail throughout the post.
Free PMI PDU Options
The following is a detailed description of methods and the resources that you can utilize to earn free PMI PDUs.
Free PDUs by Education
By taking further education, you not only earn PDUs but also update your skills in the changing and evolving work industry. The following are the free PMI PDU options that you can use:
Attending a course
If you look on the Internet, you will find many free courses that you can take to earn free PDUs. The courses can be on a variety of topics but they should relate to project management. For example, a course on project scheduling, or scheduling software like Microsoft Project, or a course on conflict management, leadership, effective communication, Lean Six Sigma. So, you see you have a lot of course options available to choose from. Master of Project Academy is also offering several free PDU courses.
And if you rather prefer to attend a physical classroom course, you may also do so. You can check up with your local PMI Chapter or government or private organizations, they often run free courses too.
Watch “How can I earn Free PMI PDUs Video”
Reading a book or article
Reading a book related to project management is a simple activity. If you think you could spare some time to read a book, this would be a great way to further extend your project management knowledge. And also ideal for earning free PMI PDUs at the same time. You may find it difficult to decide as to where to find free books to read. Well, you can find many free eBooks on and related to project management on the Internet. Some of the good options include:
- Real Life Scrum by Jesper Boeg,
- Project Management Can Be Easy by EasyProjects,
- Resource Management for Project Managers — Best Practices by teamdeck,
- 97 Things That Every Software Project Manager Should Know by O’Reilly Media
If you do not have enough time to read a book, you can read articles instead. Internet is an ocean of articles and with a little search, you will find hundreds of useful articles to read, which will be of your interest and which will also relate to project management.
Attending a webinar or conference
Attending free webinars or conferences is another way to earn PDUs. During webinars and conferences, you get a chance to learn something new and gain a new skill. This activity can be done both online or physically in person. Search on the Internet, lookup on Facebook for upcoming events online or in your city, or ask a colleague or a friend for such events.
Master of Project Academy offers Free PMI PDU Training bundle and earns you 4 PDUs for FREE. Enroll now!
If you are an active PMI member, you will also find many free PDU webinars on web. This is a PMI’s family website and there you will find regular webinars and conferences being scheduled.
Attending a gathering
Having a casual or formal talk with a group of your project team, seniors, or friends at your office or home is another free way to earn free PMI PDUs. You may invite a few of your fellows for lunch, tea, or dinner. In the gathering, there could be a learning discussion on a variety of topics like how to deal with conflicts at work, or how to manage stakeholders. This is an exciting way to earn free PMI PDU and you can attend such gathering multiples times.
PMI Talent Triangle
Whichever of the above activities you choose to participate in, remember that PMI has approved only selected categories of education that you can benefit from. These education categories are described in the PMI Talent Triangle. This focuses on the areas of Ways of Working, Business Acumen, and Power Skills. These are described below in detail.
Power Skills
Power skills are helpful in managing a team. With power skills like creativity, emotional intelligence, influence, empathy, motivation, one can maximize the potential of your team as well as of the work environment. The Power Skills category of the PMI Talent Triangle requires you to gain or enhance such power skills.
Ways of Working
This category of the PMI Talent Triangle relates to the knowledge, behavior, and skills required to support the technical planning, execution, and monitoring of the project. A few common ways of working skills are cost management, earned value analysis, procurement, and scheduling.
If you have wonderful general project management skills but have no or little technical project management skills, you are likely to face difficulties understanding the product or project requirements. Moreover, when lacking ways of working skills, you will face difficulties in managing problems and finding the best solution. Hence, acquiring ways of working skills is necessary to successfully complete a project.
Business Acumen
This is about understanding your business vision and mission and executing projects that are aligned with organizational strategy. This category of the Talent Triangle expects you to have skills like operations management, business analysis, strategic planning, critical thinking, IT management, marketing, etc. Having good knowledge of the business, industry standards, the local and international market, your customers and the legal framework under which your business is operating is also desirable.
Free PDUs by Giving Back to Profession
Giving Back involves doing activities where you share your skills and knowledge in order to contribute and build the profession of project management. The Giving Back category gives you many ways to earn free PMI PDU, such as.
Creating Knowledge
You can do many things to create knowledge. Creating knowledge is an exciting way to contribute to the profession and earn free PDUs also. If you think you can write articles on or related to project management, then why not write a few articles and publish them on your blog. If you get an opportunity to write a user manual or develop training content, this too would count as creating knowledge? Or may if you like, you can even spend some time sharing your knowledge in online forums and social networks.
Volunteering
No one runs away from volunteering. Helping someone to achieve a goal or to solve a problem is always pleasing. You can do a whole lot of things to volunteer for, and this is a very easy free PMI PDU earning option too. So, how can you volunteer to earn some PDUs? Well, volunteering could include many things like helping a charity or nonprofit organization or assisting someone in their exam preparation, creating templates in your organization to help your team in their work, etc.
Working as a professional
This basically means that you work as a professional in an organization. This could also include working for another organization in the capacity of a freelancer or contractor. While working as a professional and involving in project management activities will earn you PDUs.
PMI PDU Gratis
Many people search for “PMI PDU gratis” on the web. This includes free as well as cheap material that you can utilize to earn PDUs. Since, it is not possible or easy to earn enough PDUs only through the free PMI PDU resources, utilizing cheap resources is also necessary.
Master of Project Academy offers Free PMI PDU Training bundle and earns you 4 PDUs for FREE. Enroll now!
There are a variety of places where you can find affordable resources to earn PDUs. Many websites offer cheap and even free PMI PDU courses. The variety of cheap courses available are very affordable. Often a single course costs no more than $10. You will also find occasional course promotions on the websites that allow you to purchase courses for as low as $1.
Similarly, some websites often run regular webinars and they charge a little money to give you access to these. Attending webinars is a great way to connect with industry experts and share some knowledge with others and also learn something new.
Summary
In this post, we described the PMI’s Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) program. We also described how through this program, PMI opens the opportunities for you to further enhance and broaden your project management skills and knowledge.
As learned above, if you hold a PMI certification, you must renew it after every three years through the CCR program. By earning PDUs, you fulfill the PMI’s continuing certification requirements and also demonstrate your commitment to professional development.
There are many ways to earn PDUs and there are also free PMI PDU options available to you, as described above. Remember to earn the required PDUs before the expiry date of your credential and renew it to prevent its suspension. To ensure you renew your certification on time, we also recommend that you keep earning PDUs throughout the year whether through the paid resources or by utilizing the free PMI PDU options. You can also read our PMI PDU Guide to learn more.