Understanding the Exams and Levels
There are two main exams: the Foundation and the Practitioner. Then there’s the Re-registration exam which you need to take at intervals of from three to five years to keep your Practitioner qualification up to date. Foundation and Practitioner exams are aimed at slightly different things, although there’s an overlap.
The Foundation Certificate is intended to show that you understand the terminology of the method and the how all the elements of PRINCE2 work, for example how themes are used during projects, and also how the elements work together. For example, how does the principle of ‘manage by exception’ fit into the processes?
The Practitioner Certificate, as the name suggests, is intended to show that you can apply the method to a project. The Practitioner level overlaps with Foundation in that the exam also checks for understanding of how the method is used. The Practitioner exam then goes on to test your ability to apply the method to a project by giving you a description of a project (the project ‘scenario’) and basing many, but not necessarily all, of the Practitioner questions on it. The same project scenario is used throughout a particular Practitioner paper. To put your mind at rest a bit, the pitch of the exam is that you can apply the method to a non-complex project.
The Re-registration exam is, obviously enough, at Practitioner level.
Understanding the Foundation exam
The PRINCE2 Foundation Certificate, then, is intended to show that the holder understands the principles and terminology of the method. The questions are fact based, not opinion based, so the ‘right’ answer will have been taken from the manual. The logistics of the exam are set down in the panel.
Understanding the structure of the paper
The 75 questions cover all parts of the method and are not in any particular order; they’re not grouped by subject, for example, or project sequence.
Checking that you’ve covered everything
As you use this book, you’ll see that each subject chapter has a revision checklist for Foundation. The list will help you make sure that you’ve got to grips with the areas in that subject that are significant for the Foundation exam, including those which appear on the exam syllabus. If you feel a bit uneasy about any item in the list, that’s a prompt to go and have another look at that area.
Avoiding timing out
You may be concerned that you’ll not have enough time to answer all the questions, particularly if it’s been a while since you last sat an exam. Time management is significant in the Foundation exam, but timing isn’t usually a big problem. You should have enough time to answer all the questions. In all the years I’ve been teaching PRINCE2, I’ve only ever known four or five people time out in the Foundation exam. If you end up being another one though, in Chapter 2 you’ll find some advice about managing your time in the closing minutes of the exam.
Going on to Practitioner
In order to sit the Practitioner exam, you need to have passed Foundation. If you’ve booked both exams in the same course event, don’t worry that the result of the Foundation exam won’t be available in time. The Foundation is marked immediately, and you’ll be given your result. Although that result is provisional, it’s accepted by the exam authority; if you pass, you can go on to the Practitioner exam.
You may wonder what happens if your provisional mark is a pass but when the paper is machine marked it throws up a miscount and you fail. Well, you’ve got to be right on the boundary for a miscount of a mark or two to make a difference. As explained in the next section, if you don’t score good marks in the Foundation and you’re not well clear of the pass mark, then it’s not looking good for the Practitioner anyway.
Building a firm foundation for the Practitioner level
If you’re planning to take the Practitioner exam, you need to be aware that there’s a strong correlation between good Foundation marks and success at Practitioner level. In my company, Inspirandum, we did some checks and found that those with fewer than 50 marks out of the 70 in the Foundation exam are very unlikely to pass the Practitioner. That’s a high pass mark of around 70 per cent.
You may think that this correlation sounds a little odd, since the two exams are targeted at rather different things. However, it makes more sense when you think it through. Although you can look at your manual in the Practitioner exam, unlike the Foundation where you can’t, you don’t have time to refer to it a lot. Put simply, you can look at the manual to confirm something, but you don’t have time to start reading lots of it in order to find answers. You need to be fluent in the method to pass the Practitioner, and if you need to look up lots of detail because you don’t know it, then you’re not fluent. That flows on nicely to the next section, ‘Leaving a gap between a PRINCE2 training course and sitting the Practitioner level’.
Leaving a gap between a PRINCE2 training course and sitting the Practitioner level
Many people who take both exams as part of a training course sit the exams in the same training event run in the same week. However, there’s an option to delay taking an exam. For the Practitioner exam in particular, you may want to think about leaving a gap for three reasons:
Some people learn more quickly than others; however, those who learn more slowly often remember better and keep their knowledge for much longer. If you take things on board more slowly, then you may find it an advantage to leave a gap between the exams to give you more time to absorb PRINCE2 and be sure that you understand it before you go on to take the Practitioner. That’s often much better than taking it too soon only to fail, then having to do it a second time knowing that you’ve already failed once.
The Practitioner Exam is getting steadily harder. There’s an unfortunate mechanism whereby the exam authority has focused, at least in the past, on having the ‘right’ number of people pass. As training companies have put more effort into preparing people for the exams (sadly usually at the expense of training them how to run projects well with PRINCE2), the pass rate has risen. To compensate for that, the exam has been made more difficult. Whereas it used to be fine for most people to sit the Foundation and Practitioner exams in the same week, there’s now a distinct advantage for many in leaving a gap to allow more time to check things over and, even more significantly, get in more practice with sample Practitioner questions.
You really need to have reached the right level. If you didn’t get about 50 marks or above in the Foundation, although you passed, then you aren’t quite fluent enough in PRINCE2 and you’ll benefit from having more time to brush up before you attempt the Practitioner paper.
Leaving a gap between the exams doesn’t mean you need to leave a gap in your learning though. If you’re attending a course, then you may find it better to learn the method to its full extent in one go and take the Foundation. Then go away and practise with Practitioner questions before tackling the Practitioner exam. In my company, we’ve always made it possible for people to do that. We used to find that about 10 per cent of people found it helpful to leave a gap, but the number is now much greater for the reason I’ve already explained in this section: the exam is tougher, and you also need to be familiar with the different multiple-choice question styles. When I had the superb results mentioned earlier in this chapter, I put part of the success down to the fact that the Practitioner exam followed on a week after the main training event.
Judging the gap between a course and the exam
If you’re considering a gap, how long should it be? Well, about a week is ideal. A month is fine. But after a couple of months, you’ll start to be at a disadvantage rather than having a benefit. After about two months, although you’ll have had more time to revise and practise, your speed of recall of information from the course will start to diminish. If you need to start looking a lot of things up in the manual because you can’t quite remember them, you’re in for timing problems in the exam and are more likely to fail.
Getting your certificate(s)
If you pass the Foundation and go on in the same course event to take Practitioner and you pass that too, then you’ll only get a single certificate, which is the Practitioner Certificate. You don’t need a Foundation Certificate in that case, because everyone knows that if you hold the Practitioner qualification then you must also have passed Foundation.
If you do both exams in the same training event and pass the Foundation but fail the Practitioner, then you’ll, predictably enough, get a Foundation Certificate. When you take the Practitioner again and hopefully pass this time, you’ll get a Practitioner Certificate. If you leave a gap between the exams and don’t do them at the same event, you’ll end up with a Foundation Certificate when you pass the Foundation and then a Practitioner Certificate when you pass that exam – one certificate for each end of your bookshelf.
Understanding the Practitioner Exam
The Practitioner is to test your understanding of how to use PRINCE2 and whether you can apply it to a project, as explained in the previous section.
Understanding the structure of the Practitioner paper
Six of the eight sections in the exam are each based on one theme. The remaining two sections are each based on one set of process groups. The groups are Starting Up a Project with Initiating a Project, then Managing a Stage Boundary with Closing a Project and Directing a Project, then Controlling a Stage with Managing Product Delivery.
To check that you can apply the method to a project, the exam provides details of a particular project and then bases the questions on that project scenario. Don’t worry that the project example will be some obscure branch of rocket science of which you have no knowledge. It will be about something you can understand easily enough. The example used in this book is about preparing a set of offices in a headquarters building for staff who are in a new business unit. Even if you’re not a building expert, you can understand about the need for new phone lines, carpeting and furniture.
The Practitioner exam uses some strange terminology to describe the sections. Currently each of the eight sections is termed a question, and each question has ten bits, each of which is also referred to as a question. That’s confusing to just about everyone other than PRINCE2 examiners! For clarity in this book, the eight major parts of the Practitioner paper are referred to as sections, and the ten component elements within each one, and which score a mark, are referred to as questions.
Referring to scenario information
The whole paper uses a single project scenario, and that scenario is in a physically separate part so you can have that section open alongside the question paper. The good news here is that you only have to get your head around one project and not several. There’s some initial scenario information, typically taking up about two-thirds of a side. Then for some of the sections, but not all, there’s additional information that relates just to that section. For example, it’s common to have some additional information about a project risk to go with the ‘risk’ section of the paper. In the exam, you need to take into account any extra information for the section you’re working on, but also the overall scenario information for the project.
The additional information for a section is often about half a page. However, it may be longer, and a notable example is with Organization, where there can be as much as one and a half pages describing a range of people who may be involved in the project, and from whom you’ll then be asked to select suitable people to fill project management team roles.
Keeping to time
Time management is absolutely critical. Let’s say that again for emphasis. Time management is critical for success in the Practitioner exam.
Happily the Practitioner exam, like the Foundation, lends itself to clear time management by its very structure. There are 9 sections, each worth 12 marks, so you need to distribute your answer time evenly between the 9. You won’t complete particular sections to the exact second, but you really can’t afford to slip by very much.
In my company, Inspirandum, we inevitably get some people who fail the Practitioner. Because of the practical nature of our course, such failure is very rarely because of a problem with PRINCE2 knowledge. It’s almost always down to exam technique, and within that by far the most common problem is timing out.
You’ll find advice in Chapter 2 on how to structure your time in the Practitioner exam. It isn’t as simple as dividing the two and a half hours by the eight sections, because there’s project scenario information to read first. There’s the main scenario, but then some sections will have extra project information. You’ll need to allow time for reading the main scenario and then, for each section as you come to it, any additional scenario for that section. With a bit of contingency time – good risk management – that leaves you with about 15 minutes to answer each of the sections of 10 questions.
It’s a bad mistake to ‘steal’ time from later sections if you’re struggling with one or two questions within a section. Rather than let the timing slip, take a guess at the probable answers and move on. If you spend 15 minutes extra on questions that you’re having trouble with early on in the exam, you may find you haven’t got time to do the last section, where, in the same 15 minutes, you may have scored many more marks. That can, and sometimes does, make the difference between a pass and a fail.
Guarding your feelings
The Practitioner exam is pretty tough, so most people find it a bit nerve-wracking. Bear in mind that most people pass the exam, although that involves a lot of hard work and good preparation. Try to have a positive outlook, based on your preparation, and try not to let over-concern become an additional burden. If you suffer from exam nerves and this is likely to be a particular problem, have a look at the section later in this chapter, ‘Managing Exam Nerves’.
Also be prepared for a feeling that you’ve failed after you’ve handed in your Practitioner paper. Relatively few people think that they’ve passed, although all hope it. In my company, we get a constant stream of inbound emails after we’ve sent out the results. People say some very nice things about our course and their confidence that they can now go out and use PRINCE2 well on their projects, but when reflecting on a successful exam outcome they often say ‘I was really surprised, because I was sure I’d failed.’
Understanding the Re-registration exam
Your PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification lasts forever, but it’s dated. You’re only considered up to date if you regularly top up with a Re-registration exam. This must be done at intervals of between three and five years. If you do top up within this window, you need only take the Re-registration exam, which is shorter than the full Practitioner. If you leave it longer than five years, then to get up to date again you have to face a full Practitioner paper.
Preparing for the Re-registration exam
You don’t necessarily have to attend a training course to go for the Re-registration exam. However, it’s worth considering to get back up to exam speed, and especially if there has been a new edition of the PRINCE2 manual since you last did the exam. On a training course, you can be shown where the method has changed since the previous edition of the manual.
You must allow sufficient time for preparing for the Re-registration. As with the full Practitioner exam, that means both revision and practice with exam questions. If you haven’t used all of the method for a while on projects, you’ll probably be well aware of the need to prepare. But if you’re using PRINCE2 regularly, you can be lulled into a false sense of security that you know what you’re doing on projects so you don’t need to revise too much. Remember that you need to be really fluent in the method to be successful. On a project, you can spend a few minutes reading something up in the manual if you need to. In the exam, you can’t keep doing that, because you’re under time pressure; you have to know it already and be able to recall the information quickly and accurately.
You need to put time aside to revise and practise for the Re-registration exam. Don’t try to slot in a bit of revision in the evenings, after long days on a busy project, in the few days leading up to the exam. If possible, take two or three days out before the exam so you can really focus. That’s likely to be much more time-efficient than doing a bit of revision, travelling to and from the exam, and taking the exam only to fail and have to do it all over again.
Practising with questions
Probably the most important part of your preparation for Re-registration is practice with the Practitioner-level questions. If you’re up to speed on each of the question styles, you’ll find the exam that much less daunting. Buying this book is a good start to getting up to speed with the question styles, but do also get the practice papers from the exam authority or the training company where you’ll be taking the exam. That gives you even more opportunity to practise against the clock.
Don’t be fooled that because you’ve been using PRINCE2 for some years on live projects, the exam will be that much easier for you. Sadly perhaps, the PRINCE2 exam is about passing the PRINCE2 exam, not running live projects with the method. Be warned that the exam authority did some checking a while ago and found that the pass rate for Re-registration was no higher than the pass rate for Practitioner. In other words, practical experience of applying the method doesn’t seem to offer any advantage when it comes to the Practitioner exam.