Brain Sensei: PMP Training Review [2022]

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Are you considering Brain Sensei for your PMP training? This review will help you understand if it’s the right online project management course for you.

Product: Brain Sensei

Certification: Project Management Professional (PMP)®

Cost: $499.99 USD for 1 year of access

Are you interested in gaining your PMP certification with an online course? Brain Sensei could be the perfect choice for you! Let’s find out…

Overview of Brain Sensei PMP Training

Brain Sensei is a PMP Exam Prep Course, but it’s unlike other courses I’ve seen or taken because it is based in feudal Japan. Plus, the main character is a female Samurai.

When I went through the first Module I was drawn in from the beginning — who doesn’t want to be the project manager who rallies the community to build a castle to protect our children and the village?

It’s online video-based training and it’s really well put together. It actually made me want to learn about processes, which is a rare thing. I can’t resist a puzzle.

Pros

Highly interactive

There is a lot of content to read on screen but it’s built on the Articulate platform and it’s highly interactive.

If you aren’t sure what that means, it means you get to touch the screen, select options, do self-assessment quizzes, drag and drop and all those kind of things.

Interactivity means you are more likely to remember what you’re learning, which should increase your chances of passing the exam. Having to engage with the materials means you improve your recall, apparently.

Test your skills

There are also built-in self-assessments, so you can assess your progress as you go. I don’t know about you, but I always like to know how I am doing.

There are also 4 full practice exams (with 1,500 questions). It’s so important to know what it feels like to sit in a chair for the length of a full exam and manage your time.

Complete PMP content

There are 9 modules, and it’s a full PMP® training course that covers everything right from the beginning. The lessons are short.

Study in 2 months

The course online help section says most people complete the material in 1-2 months which is perfect if you are trying to squash your PMP studies into a short time frame.

The fact that you can access the materials on your tablet or phone makes it easy to fit your study into your busy life.

Guarantee

They offer a 100% pass guarantee and will extend your access to the course if you don’t pass the exam. With a 99.6% pass rate, it seems unlikely that you will have to take advantage of it, but it is nice to know it is available. Plus they have a 30-day refund policy if you decide it isn’t the course for you after you purchase.

Offline Mode

If you are an Apple Podcast user, you can watch a video walkthrough of the learning modules when you are offline. Both Android and Apple users can stream via the Spotify and Apple Podcast apps.

Cons

Slow page load times

Some of the pages took a while to load. This probably says more about my internet connection on the shocking wifi in our house than the product, but do make sure you’ve got a decent connection before you start a study session — as you would with any online training course.

1 year of access

You only get access to the course materials for 1 year.

Actually, this is an advantage, because if you can’t motivate yourself to study and sit the exam in a year, then PMP probably isn’t for you.

If you do want access to the materials for longer, I expect you could reach out to the provider for an extension (and there may be a fee for this). However, you really should be aiming to study and take the exam within a fixed time period. The deadline on access to the training helps focus the mind.

Very click-heavy

Because it’s so interactive, there are lots of places to click. If you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts like me, then you’ll have to turn to the mouse.

Having said that, I now have a touch-screen laptop so that makes this level of interactivity more manageable as I can just touch the screen instead of having to use the mouse, and that’s easier on my hands than constant clicking.

Try Brain Sensei PMP training for free

You can sign up for a free trial and click around inside the course to see what it’s like. I highly recommend you do that, because it will either give you the confidence to take the course or make you realize that it isn’t a good fit for your learning style. If you’re about to embark on your PMP exam prep then you should check it out on the Brain Sensei website.

The trial will give you a sense of what the full course material is going to be like. You’ll get a taste of the full PMP prep course, and be in a better position to make an informed decision about whether this is the course for you.

I say it’s definitely worth checking out!

Instructor-led Virtual Course Option

They also offer an instructor-led course that offers a few different options including a 5-day bootcamp style class, a weekend course, and a twice a week course spread over 5 weeks. This style of class gives you the opportunity to interact with other project managers and the instructor. It also comes with the self-study course.

Brain Sensei vs PM PrepCast

I’ve long used products from Cornelius Fichtner of The Project Management PrepCast fame for my own professional development. So how does Brain Sensei compare to the PM PrepCast?

The main difference is that Brain Sensei is story-based learning and the PM PrepCast is a more traditional presentation-based course. They are both self-paced.

They both meet the education requirement of 35 formal project management training hours and both will prepare you enough to take the exam.

• Both provide 35 contact hours.
• Both cover the full range of things you need to know for the exam.
• Both offer a huge amount of study material and practice questions.

It’s a personal preference. I don’t want to tell you which one to buy as everyone is different, but know that they are both top quality courses and whichever one you go for, you’ll end up prepared for the exam if you put in the work.

Summary: Is Brain Sensei PMP Training Good?

I’ve never seen a PMP training course with so much interactivity and engagement built into the course materials. Studying feels easy. The storyline is great. I was worried the cartoon-y-ness would feel infantilizing but I didn’t get that sense from it at all.

It’s a cost-effective course, especially now PMI Authorized Training Partners are selling live classroom courses (virtual or in-person) as they obviously have the overhead of a real trainer and small group class sizes.

If you learn well through video but need a good story to keep you engrossed in the material, this course will be perfect to help you prepare for the PMP® exam.

Get Brain Sensei now

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