Episode 472: Cornelius Fichtner's New Book (Free)

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Cornelius Fichtner's new book The 50 PMP® Exam Prep Questions Everyone Gets Wrong is now available.

The premise is, that there are some topics everyone gets wrong on the Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam. Being able to answer tricky questions can mean the difference between a pass and a fail. Using data from thousands of mock PMP exams and insights from experienced classroom trainers, he identified, analyzed and explains the project management concepts that most students struggle to grasp.

Buy the book on Amazon.

This step-by-step guide to the trickiest concepts on the PMP exam shows you:

• How to answer the different PMP question types
• How to tackle the 10 most challenging exam topics
• How to use a proven three-step approach for studying with sample questions
• How to cope with vague and confusing questions on exam day

Using 50 PMP exam sample questions, Cornelius Fichtner, PMP, CSM, and the driving force behind the world’s most popular PMP exam simulator, explains the most difficult project management concepts you’ll encounter on the test. Learn the ‘why’ behind each question with real stories, examples and detailed explanations. Test yourself as you read along!

This episode was recorded live and, as usual, we got some insightful questions and comments from the audience!

Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam: PMP Exam prep

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Video Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone, and welcome to the launch of “The 50 PMP Exam Prep Questions Everyone Gets Wrong.”

Hello, everybody and welcome! I’m Cornelius Fichtner and my name is on the book. I have written a few other books previously, ebooks, shorter ones, 20, 30 pages long, but this the first real book, “real” that there’s my name. Thank you so much for joining me here today as we are launching the book.

So what are we going to do today? First, I’m going to take you through the book. I’ll show you a little bit what it’s all about, what we were trying to do, what the book will help you in the Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam prep. Then I have a few thank you’s. There are a few people that were instrumental in helping me create this book.

Then we’re going to open it up and we’re going to go through three questions. I’m going to show you the question. You can tell me which answer is correct and then we’ll go through it.

We’ll do a book giveaway. Yes! One lucky person today will walk away with a Kindle version of the book. And then we’ll also talk about a discount for our PMP® Exam Simulator™.

Alright! So, before we do that, however, what I would like you to do is this: If you are preparing for the PMP® Exam and you would like to be entered into the giveaway then the tool that we are using here to stream this live has a simple solution. Just type the number 50 “#50” into the chat either on Facebook and on YouTube and that will automatically add you into the giveaway.

I see the first people coming in. So what I’m doing right now is I am checking this here and I can see that yup, the entries are adding up. So this is working wonderfully. We will be doing this at the end. I’ll be reminding you again and again about this #50 here. So 21 entries, 22, alright, keep them coming. Thank you very much.

So now then, let’s launch the book. Here it is!

Video Presentation

Cornelius Fichtner: This is the book! “The 50 PMP Exam Prep Questions That Everyone Gets Wrong.” Alright! If you hadn’t yet seen it, the link, I’ve provided it earlier here. There we go. You can find the book here: www.pm-exam-simulator.com/50questions if you are interested in taking a look.

I have a copy here myself. It just arrived. Wait! Where are we? Here! It just arrived yesterday. There is an unboxing video that I have. You see me taking it out of the box. You will see me speechless because this was quite overwhelming having your first book published here. So that’s wonderful. Let me give that to you https://www.pm-exam-simulator.com/50unboxing.There we go! That is the link. It’ll appear at any moment here in the chat for you. There we are. Okay!

So conceptually, conceptually, we realized that the student results in our exam simulator offer an additional learning opportunity here. So what we did is, we collected and exported the results of about 70 questions from our exam simulator. So whenever somebody takes an exam, quiz, the data gets stored and we keep that, and just to give you the numbers, all questions that we exported had hundreds of responses, 1420 is the largest and on average, 75 percent of the time, students picked the incorrect answer. So each question that is in the book at least 75 percent of people had the answer incorrect for each of these. In one case, it is 95 percent, right? So in one question in the book, only 5 percent of people get this question right the first time.

Alright! Then we analyze each question. We make sure that it is a fair question that students can reasonably expect to see this on their PMP® Exam. And if not, we dropped and we took it out of the book.

Then we interpreted our findings and said: ‘Okay! Why are people getting this wrong? What’s wrong with this? What is the concept?’ And we explained the topic to help the students understand how to answer the question, the concept correctly, how to analyze this and how to not make the mistake on the real PMP® Exam.

The result is obviously a collection of the 50 hardest PMP® Exam questions in the book. But frankly, that’s actually not correct because even though the book says the 50 PMP hardest questions because questions, that’s the thing. PMP questions is what people are looking for. It’s really and truly the 50 hardest PMP concepts in a book based on our findings in the exam simulator, right?

So the book is about explaining these concepts, the knowledge, the tools, the skills, the techniques that you have to understand for your PMP® Exam and for each of them, we have a question that’s really hard and really difficult and you can take it, you can see those by getting the book.

And where do you buy the book? Well, here you go! It is http://www.pm-exam-simulator.com/50questions. Let me give that link to you again here in the chat. Here we go! There you are! This will take you straight to Amazon where you can take a look at the book and hopefully buy it. But don’t forget, we’re giving one away today. So, wait until the end.

Alright! Here’s the book, the content. It has four parts. In part one, we decided to add additional information. You know, it’s not good if you just start with question one, right? Here are the 50 hardest questions. Well, we want you to be able to prepare a little bit, okay, to get your mind going. There is an exclusive article as well. In Section one, I will talk about that in just a moment.

Then part two, that’s where you will find the questions. There is also a separate PDF document that comes with the book. It’s free to download on our website. So that you can print it and you can write your answers into the answer sheet. In that way, you don’t have to write into your book, okay?

Then in part three, you will get that answers and explanation. So we’ll take a look at those in detail as well. And then in part four, we have a number of featured articles and those are really to help you prepare for the exam. So get exam ready, that’s what part four is with tips and tricks as you are getting ready for the exam.

Akram asks: “Is the book available in digital format?” Yes, Akram. The book is available as a Kindle as well, and even if you don’t have Kindle. For example, I do not have Kindle but you can just read it on Amazon.com in your browser. So Kindle has a web functionality as well. So you don’t need a physical Kindle that you can hold in your hands.

Yes, alright! Jafar asks the same question: “How can I get it?” Well, you can wait until the end. Maybe you win it, Jafar, or you can simply go to http://www.pm-exam-simulator.com/50questions where you can buy it. Alright!

Then let us move on. I talked about these two exclusive articles. There are two of them. One is in part one as you are preparing. We thought, you know like I said, it is unfair to just throw the 50 questions at you and just go: ‘Here they are.’ They really aren’t. So we decided, okay, let’s write an article. And what we did is we wrote an article “The Ten Topics Everyone Gets Wrong on the PMP Exam”. The article and the questions are not a hundred percent match because we talked to PMP trainers from around the world, colleagues of mine and said: “Hey, what are the topics that your students always have problems with?” And then we took those and we created an article for that. And this is an exclusive article only found in the book and so, let’s see the ten topics, which data analysis technique to use and when, how to handle change requests, the best tools to measure progress, the stages of team performance, how to manage risk in Agile sprints, how to close a project, how to start a project just to name a few. So these are the topics that are covered in that article in part one.

And then later on, later on in part four, we have another exclusive article: “How to cope with PMP® Exam question vagueness.” And I wrote that article because this year, I have been reading, oh I would say about 200 at least lessons learned of people who have just taken and passed their PMP® Exam. And the vagueness of the questions on the real PMP® Exam is an incredible shock to exam takers. Let me read this comment here to you that somebody said: “With my PrepCast Exam Simulator practice exam results steadily increasing in acceptable ranges, I was pretty confident in my knowledge going in to the exam.” So the student said: I had good results and then I went to take the exam. ‘After the first ten or so questions of the actual exam, my confidence level was an all-time low whereas during the PrepCast practice exams, I felt like I was getting three-quarters of the questions right as I went and during the PMP® Exam, I had zero feeling that I was doing well.’ So this vagueness of the real exam questions is an absolute shocker to people. So I decided to write an article and give seven recommendations on how to cope with this vagueness. And again, this is an exclusive article that can only be found in the book.

Syed asks: “If I buy the print version, will I get the Kindle version also?” You would have to buy that separately, I believe. Amazon does not automatically bundle the two together. That is my understanding.

Okay, well, now you understand sort of the concept behind the book, right? So we took about 70 questions. We analyzed them. We reduced them down to really the 50 top ones that are fair questions, fair concepts that you will find on the exam and put them into the book. Now, what I want to make sure is that you understand what this book is and what it isn’t, okay? Here it is.

Above are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Please subscribe to our Premium Podcast to receive a PDF transcript.