Professional Development Units (PDUs)

What are PDUs?

Professional Development Units (PDUs) are one-hour blocks of time spent learning, volunteering or tutoring. Collecting them is required to maintain your certification status. Different certifications have different demands/ requirements for PDU maintenance.

PDUs have two categories – Education and Giving Back to the Profession.

• Education PDUs can be earned at professional seminars, webinars, classes, or self-directed learning.
• Giving Back PDUs are earned by spending your time volunteering, mentoring, working with professional groups, and more.

Why are PDUs important?

As the profession of project manager grows and changes, maintaining your relevancy is a must. By investing effort in sustaining your certification, you have a significant competitive advantage. You can get a better position and a higher chance of being the solution the company needs.

How to earn PDUs?

In order to stay certified, you will need to reach the required PDUs of certification in project management. You earn PDUs by doing various activities such as:

• Attending a course or training
• Attending meetings, activities and local events related to the profession that includes an educational component that provides an opportunity to learn and also to network
• Self-paced learning conducted online or through varied forms of digital media
• Reading books, articles, whitepapers, or blogs related to your certification to stay informed and support your ongoing professional development
• Learning informally by having educational opportunities that are focused on structured discussions
• Work as a practitioner in your certified role
• Create content such as authoring books, blogs or articles, or creating presentations that are for use by practitioners and the public at large

You can also earn PDUs by joining courses and membership by the Institute of Project Management (IPM).