PMP Certification Training is one of flagship training courses of Greycampus. And this article tries to present you with an objective assessment of the course – both in terms of quality & delivery of content, and usability of the platform.
For someone that is choosy about reviewing every PMP prep resource, I was excited when my good friend George Manson invited me for an honest review the Greycampus Online Self-learning PMP training course.
This standalone review, I hope, will give you enough objective insights into the learning platform and Greycampus PMP Training Course, and will help you make a decision about investing in a PMP study resources.
What’s Covered in this Greycampus PMP Training Course Review?
Pretty much what you need to decide whether this course will help you in your PMP quest.
What is Greycampus?
Platform and Course Components
The Dashboard
Video Lessons – Core Learning Feature
Personalize Topic-wise Practice Tests
Video overview of PMP Learning Platform
3 Full-length Mock Tests
Health Check?
Value Adds: Additional Study Resources
A Study Plan You Can Use With This Course
Areas to Improve
My Recommendation
“What about the cost, Shiv?”
We will also try to answer some of the questions being asked about this course.
This review is painstakingly put together over 8 days, and covers every aspect of this course that you need to understand to decide whether this is a good fit for your study plan.
So relax, get yourself a cup of hot coffee, I have mine here, and let us get started!
What is Greycampus?
As a company Greycampus Inc. provides online and offline training for working professionals in the areas of project management, big data, data science, service management, quality management, programming, networking, and more. It offers live-online (instructor-led online), classroom (instructor-led classroom), and e-learning (online self-learning) courses.
Greycampus Inc. was incorporated in 2014 and is based in Dallas, Texas. So far it has trained over 100,000 professionals.
With that said, let us jump right in.
Oh, by the way, towards the end of this review I will also give you my suggested study plan that suits this course.
I will also share with you a short video showcasing the platform in a second.
Platform & Course Components
PMP Training Course uses a nice study platform with components that enhance the quality of learning.
The course essentially has 3 types of study aids – Video lessons, Mock tests & Flashcards.
Apart from this it allows you to download Student Study Kit – comprising of study materials, video transcripts, Cheat sheets, Formula guide, and even an interactive game to identify ITTOs for processes.
Video lessons are presented by Jim Owens, 20+ year Project Management Professional veteran, the master project manager. You will enjoy the occasional humor he sprinkles into his talk.
The Dashboard
From here you can choose to either go to the video lessons, full length mock tests, practice tests, see the progress you have made through the course and overall performance on all tests you have taken, study using flashcards, download the student study kit, or provide your feedback to Greycampus team about the course.
Video Lessons – the Core Learning Feature
You can access the video training interface from the menu icon (3 horizontal lines) on the top left corner on the dashboard. Clicking this will bring about the interface with lessons menu on the left side & videos on the right panel.
One of the cool things is that you have video transcript right on the right sidebar, which scrolls in sync with the video. If you are in hurry, have issue with bandwidth, or find it hard to understand Jim’s accent, just read thru the transcript.
Like many PMP video courses, this course makes use of the flow based on PMBOK – sections are based on knowledge areas, and sub-sections – which contain a video lesson each – are based either on processes or key concepts.
I enjoyed the occasional humor in Jim’s presentation. One aspect that I liked a lot is how he makes use of real-life examples to drive home the point.
[su_button url=”https://www.pmexamsmartnotes.com/pmpgc” target=”blank” style=”3d” background=”#fc842e” color=”#000000″ size=”8″ wide=”yes” center=”yes” icon=”icon: arrow-right” icon_color=”#000000″ text_shadow=”1px 0px 0px #645757″ title=”Click to continue..”]Click to read more about Greycampus PMP training course features..[/su_button]
Personalize Topic-wise (or Broadest) Practice Tests
The unique aspect of this learning mode is that you can choose topics – one or more – to get practice questions on.
Further, you could choose if you want unanswered, answered, both, incorrect or flagged questions to be included in the custom test you are making for yourself.
Next you can also choose this practice test to be in test mode (all answers are shown in the end), choose if you want a time limit, and start the practice test!
Something like a food platter you make for yourself from the spread on the table.
You’ll get about 139 questions, on an average 10 questions for each topic.
This fine tuning of questions will allow you to focus on the topics you need to test yourself on, or go broad to test your overall preparedness.
Let us take a pause here and let me show you the ease of using Greycampus learning platform.
3 Full-length, 4-hr, 200-Question Mock tests
One of the best way of learning is taking a mock test. This helps you understand your grey areas so you can focus on them and study better. For testing yourself for your overall preparedness you have 3 full-length, 200 questions, 4-hour mock tests.
These tests time you just like the real exam – there is no stopping the time once you begin your test.
Once the test is submitted you can review all the answers.
Review also shows you the time you took to answer each of them, and difficulty level of the questions. This is a unique feature that I have not seen in other PMP simulators.
Review Your Progress
In the Reports section you’ll be able to see topic-wise progress you have made over a time period, further filtering by the result type (correct, incorrect), difficulty level (Easy, medium, hard) and pace (slower/higher than the average time taken by all students of the course).
Health Check
This is a quick visual indicator of how much of the course you have completed, and what has been your overall performance on the tests you have taken.
You see the green and orange circles with percentage in the image below? That’s the health check indication on the dashboard. I was impressed by this feature as soon as I logged in and took a screenshot, and you can see 0% in Performance as well as Progress for me 🙂
Value Adds: Additional Study Resources
Here you have few more modes of study under Value Adds section –
1. Flashcards
These are online flashcards and non-downloadable. There are over 500 of them. A great way to quickly study few random concepts. Or revise them.
I could not, however, figure how to proceed where you left last time in order to complete the flashcard study over multiple study slots.
2. Downloadable PMP Student Kit
This kit contains,
- Study notes
- Video transcripts
- Cheat sheets
- Formulas
- And even an interactive game interface to fill in appropriate ITTOs into each of the processes. A great way to learn about ITTOs!
But I already told you about this.
If you want to give some feedback to the Greycampus team about the course, feel free to use the course eval form. Or, you can do that from individual video lessons page as well.
Analysis of Your Performance
This is another way of getting to a specific place within course content. And it shows few stats such as % correct questions answered in each subtopic, your pace in seconds etc.
I’m not sure if this really helps – my guess is that this may acts as a motivation to complete the topics.
[su_button url=”https://www.pmexamsmartnotes.com/pmpgc” target=”blank” style=”3d” background=”#fc842e” color=”#000000″ size=”8″ wide=”yes” center=”yes” icon=”icon: arrow-right” icon_color=”#000000″ text_shadow=”1px 0px 0px #645757″ title=”Click to continue..”]Click to read more about Greycampus PMP training course features..[/su_button]
Here’s a Study Plan you can use along with this course
- The first thing to do is to take time to understand the platform without jumping straight into the videos.
- Video lessons follow the same structure as PMBOK, so if you choose to video study topics in parallel across study resources – which is proven to be a great strategy to break monotony of a study resources, and enhance understanding – you’ll be able to follow along well.
- Plan your study schedule based on various tools of learning on this platform. Match to your study calendar. For instance, decide when would you want to study the flashcards, when to take practice tests, when to take 3 full-length mock tests and so on.
- Create milestones – for instance, based on the Knowledge Areas – and put a study duration for each milestone (hours/days/weeks) based on the study time you can dedicate each day.
- Take at least one full-length mock test after one round of study and then take the other 2 intermittently
- Claim your 35hr certification, submit your application on PMI website.
Greycampus PMP Training Course: Areas to improve
No study resource is perfect in every way. Neither is this one.
Here are few areas I found that could be improved –
1. I personally found it a bit hard to follow Jim’s content delivery, and I found that the Closed Captions feature was not working.
The great thing is that the transcript scrolls in the window next to the video, which you can follow easily along with the video. Then again for few videos the transcript scroll was missing. I could not make out whether this is due to the browser I was using or a temporary technical glitch.
However, the student study kit has the slides and transcript for you to refer to.
2. Found few remnants of PMBOK-5 content in couple of places, for instance, older process names in Flashcards. This is expected when a course is updated for latest content, and I didn’t find any impact of this on the quality of the course.
3. I felt that some amount of interactivity in the videos would have made it more engaging. And then like I said the other supplemental study resources make up for this. If you solely depend on great quality video training for your study, then you may find this lacking a bit of zing.
4. Lastly, this course does not allow you to download videos. Which means that whenever you want to study you need to have a good Internet connection that can play videos. For some people this could be a bit dampener.
My Recommendation
There you have it, all the good, bad, and ugly of Greycampus PMP Training Course – an objective, hands-on, in-depth review.
If you are looking for a comprehensive video based PMP study resource, that includes a bunch of additional study resources, you have Greycampus PMP Training Course right here.
The course contains the following –
- Video lessons covering all of PMBOK topic and then some more, such as Ethics and Professional Responsibility
- A full one-year access to the course – this is one of the very few courses that give you longest access
- Bunch of additional study resources such as Flashcards, Cheat sheets, Formula guide, Critical path calculations, and Interactive ITTO filler for processes
- This course is fully compliant with PMBOK-6 version, of course you knew that already.
- Greycampus is PMI’s REP (registered education provider), so the course quality is tested and certified by PMI
- 35 contact hours certificate – a mandatory requirement set by PMI for appearing for PMP exam
“What about the cost, Shiv?”
Yes I give it to you, Greycampus PMP Training Course is one of the expensive courses in the PMP prep market. While the content pretty much does justice to the price, right now you can get 50% discount, for a limited time – which brings down the cost quite a bit, making it one of the most economical PMP prep courses in the market!
Here’s how to grab it –
- Step 1: Click this specially discounted link to Greycampus PMP Training Course page
- Step 2: Click the ‘ENROLL NOW’ Yellow button next to ‘Online Self Learning’
- Step 3: On the next page, click ‘I have a coupon code’ check box in Payment Details section
- Step 4: Enter the coupon code SMART50 in the text box and click Apply button. You will see a 50% reduction in course fee instantly.
I trust this review of Gerycampus’ PMP Certification Training course has given you some insights to make a decision about invest in the course.
If you are interested to see a hands-on review of Cornelius’s PMPrepCast please click here. Unlike Greycampus course, this lets you download videos so you can watch without Internet connection.
And…
If you’d like to research into Simplilearn’s PMP Video training course, click here for my exhaustive review!
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