How many working days is 4500 hours?

Learning Mudra, Category - PMP


Are you also confused about the Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification eligibility criteria described by Project Management Institute (PMI)? Don’t worry you are not the only one who is going through this dilemma. This happens with most of those who has gone through various articles and read about the PMP Certification eligibility criteria. The most confusing part is the time duration. At some places it is written in hours and at some places it’s mentioned in months and at places it’s mentioned in years. And another confusing thing is how much years of experience is needed and with which degree?

Understand the eligibility criteria

To solve this puzzle let’s first understand what is the eligibility criteria of PMI’s PMP Certification. The eligibility criteria says that if you have spent 4 years to earn your graduate degree then you are required to have 36 months work experience of leading projects. Other part of it says that if you don’t have a graduate degree instead you have high school diploma then you are required to have 60 months of work experience of leading projects to be eligible for this certification. Apart from this for either type of professional eligibility, you must have done 35 hours of training.

It's not that easy

Now the eligibility criteria might look simple to you but let me tell you that it is not the case. You must be thinking that 36 months means 3 years but it is equal to 1,080 days and that is equal to 25,920 hours. But there’s a point which you might have missed. At many places, 36 months is written as 4500 hours. This means that 4500 hours of work experience should be gained by an employee in no less than 3 years of time span and nor in more than 8 years of duration.

There’s a twist

The PMI highly support work-life balance and recommends everyone to follow this approach. Now let’s understand what PMI means by work-life balance. This means that no employee should spend more than 40 hours per week on his/her professional life, i.e., 8 hours per day so that he/she spends remaining time of the week with the family or doing anything for his/her personal life. So according to this an employee works for 5 days a week if working for 8 hours a day and those 5 days would be termed as working days.

So till now 8 hours per day is 40 hours per week. On an average an employee may go for vacations or will take leaves due to many reasons for about 10 working days a year. This means that on an average an employee will work for only 50 weeks out of 52 weeks in a year. With the calculation of 40 hours for 50 weeks implies that an employee if not taking leaves for more than 10 working days would work for 2000 hours in a year; calculation done by multiplying 40 and 50 which equals to 2000.

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Don’t exceed 40 hours per week

Even though an employee who works for more than 40 hours a week,then while calculation is being done the PMI would recognise only initial 40 hours per week and if your number of working hours are suspicious to PMI, you will be called for audit.Now you have to implement this to calculate your number of working days. As 8 hours equal to 1 working day and 40 hours equal to 5 working days.Hence, to convert hours into number of working days you need todivide number of hours by 8 (hours per day).

Mention only relevant working hours

You need to prove these 4500 hours or 7500 hours (as per your degree/diploma) in the application form. You should not calculate your work experience in terms of years/ weeks/ days/working days but your calculation must be based upon the number of working hours that you have spent while working on a project. First try to include the number of working hours for big projects which shows great impact of your work and then include working hours of other projects. You may not need to add working hours of all the projects, only the relevant ones would suffice.

Your experience should include projects led by you

The another aspect of confusion is that when you read the eligibility criteria you’ll notice that for work experience it is mentioned that 36 or 60 months of experience for leading projects.You should understand that leading over here does not mean that you should be a project manager. You may be a project coordinator or have another role in a project and still be leading the project. It completely depends on how you justify your role in project description so that your PMP application form does not get rejected and you are able to prove that you are eligible.

Conclusion to the Topic: How many working days is 4500 hours?

Just remember one thing that writing your PMP application form is one of the important and little time consuming task as you should not enter any irrelevant details in it. That’s why this calculative article is written so that if your supervisor gives you the number of working days that you have spent you are able to calculate how many days you need to cover more or less as per your requirement. Make sure that your supervisor have given consent to your number of working hours/days so that there is no problem in case of audit.

The Author : Learning Mudra


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