Last week I got my PRINCE2 Practitioner certification and boy it felt good. I wasn’t really nervous about failing the exam as I had passed all the test-exams leading up to the final one. However I must say my heart started hammering a bit when I pressed the “end exam” button so I could get my results. Those few seconds can feel like an eternity and you start thinking about a lot of different things, like “should I have changed my answer on the last question?” or “what am I going to do if I fail?”. My end results showed that I had passed by a good margin, so everything was good.
I’m really glad I took the course. I have learned a lot about project management and I feel PRINCE2 provides a really good framework for project management. Previously I have just been working and managing projects my own way. Though I wasn’t bad at it, I now see I simply didn’t have a proper framework for doing things. Ignorance is bliss as they say and now I know a lot better.
I was really focused on doing my homework in between classes as the material was pretty intensive reading, something my girlfriend noticed – according to her, she had rarely seen me that focused before, when she compared it to when I was in school. Looking back I can see why. In school our teachers didn’t set the expectations / bar so high as here and we had way too much time to do our projects. Here I essentially had to learn a bunch of theory and methods in about 6 weeks time and I quickly realised I really had to make an effort if I wanted to get something out of it. I also realised that I actually enjoyed the material, which also may have helped a great deal.
To add to that we also had a really great teacher with a lot of project management experience himself. He was able to explain PRINCE2 in a very clear and concise way while showing us what kind of pitfalls we should be aware of. He also coupled some real-life stories into the theory to further our understanding of the material and how it worked in practice.
All in all, I can only recommend the course if you want to learn more or get into project management. Don’t go for the 2 or 4 day courses you can get, as you don’t get the same level of understanding and it is basically rote learning. Go for a course spread out over a month or so. That way you don’t drown in homework (though you have to read up on it) and you get a better and more thorough understanding of PRINCE2.