Project Manager Professional Development – Free PDUs

As part of PMI’s Continuing Certification Requirements program, a PMP credential holder will need to earn a minimum of 60 PDUs per three-year cycle.

As a PMP, I am always looking for Professional Development opportunities. There are many free opportunities which offer in depth education. Many of the free PDUs available are Category C PDUs (Self-Directed Learning). You can claim up to 30 of these type of PDUs in every 3 year certification cycle. However, free resources abound for Category A (Registered Education Providers) and Category B (Continuing Education) professional development as well. Note that I am not affiliated with any of these organizations.

Category A – Registered Education Providers

The Brighttalk platform offers a number of webinars from CA Technologies which are eligible for Category A PDUs. These webinars offer solid Look for the PPM Insights – CA Technologies channel.

Category B – Continuing Education Providers

Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Coursera usually has at least one class related specifically to project management.

Here is an example scheduled to begin in April of 2015.
https://www.coursera.org/course/basicprojmanage

Openculture.com provides links to 150 free business classes from top universities (Oxford, University of Michigan to name a few).

ALISON, a global online learning community, offers a free “Fundamentals of Project Management” certificate course.

http://www.saylor.org/courses/bus402/Saylor.org offers a comprehensive course on project managment – over 150 hours of learning time. This is one of the most comprehensive courses available online. And it’s free!

MIT Open Courseware also provides many free business, science, technology and project management classes.