Project Manager Interview: Questions, Cases and PMBOK

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

While you are answering, the interviewer is ticking boxes on a form you have never seen. Most preparation ignores that form entirely.

Preparing from the wrong side

You memorise a list of likely questions and rehearse answers to them. Then the interview happens and something else is going on: a structured behavioural sequence, scored against anchored indicators, with a second interviewer taking notes on a scale from one to five. Your answer was fine and it scored a two, because it described a situation and never named a result. You have reached the final round twice and been told they went with someone else, and nobody explained which box stayed empty. Meanwhile a weaker candidate who happened to speak in the right structure got the offer.

What this course covers

Thirty-four lessons in four movements. The subject first, because a project manager is examined on the craft: what a project is and its four stages, PMBOK 7 principles and performance domains, the business case and the charter, cost-benefit analysis, stakeholder mapping and influence-interest assessment, scope and documented assumptions, decomposition and the network diagram, duration estimates and the Gantt chart, the resource matrix, cost types and the three stages of a budget, risk identification and management, matrix structures and role allocation, control and deviation handling, the communications plan, and closure. Then the assessment machine: what a scorecard is, why most hiring decisions are made in ten minutes, the halo effect and cloning, the intake meeting that produced your requirements, must-have against nice-to-have, behavioural indicators and the five-point anchored scale, competency libraries, profiling from top performers, behavioural, situational, panel and stress formats, STAR and CARE, achievement interviewing after Lou Adler, how an interviewer detects an invented example, assessment scales, role plays and assessment centres, and how candidates are compared and ranked afterwards. Then your own answers: who is interviewing you and how that shifts the questions, self-presentation built on achievements and numbers, trap questions, salary, departures, layoffs, pressure and ethically questionable questions, the questions you ask at the end, and negotiating the offer. Finally the funnel: how vacancies arise, how a recruiter reads a CV, the telephone screen, staying steady through a long search, asking for a raise, and being found on LinkedIn.

Two blocks recorded for a different audience

The scorecard block was recorded for the hiring side, and its second step fills a card in for a real role. That is deliberate: it is the exact document you are being marked against, and reading it from the inside is the fastest way to understand your own scores. The interview-preparation block was recorded for candidates in the people function, so its worked question examples come from that field. The structure of a strong answer, the handling of money and departures, and the closing questions are the same in any role.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 34 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: PMBOK 7 principles and domains, the charter, stakeholder mapping, the network diagram and Gantt chart, risk assessment, the scorecard structure and anchored scale, competency libraries, STAR and CARE, the self-presentation structure, and the salary conversation

• The interviewer's toolkit taught in full, rather than a list of questions to memorise

Where to start

Write down the last three interview questions you answered badly. By lesson nineteen you will know which indicator each one was testing. Enrol now and start today.