Observations on the CMRP Exam
- The five subject areas identified in the certification
guide are business management, people skills (organization & leadership), equipment reliability, process reliability, and work management (mostly maintenance planning, but also a bit of project management). Questions are drawn from these categories. - Plenty of time was given. There were 110 multiple-choice questions to be completed in 150 minutes. I initially answered all questions in 90 minutes and then spent another 30 minutes checking back over the entire test. having perused online bulletin boards, I found no one that took longer than 2 hours to completethe test.
- Much less than half of the test was “technical.” If you don’t understand what vibration spectrum side bands are, you will probably still be fine. However, you will have to know what the major condition monitoring methods are, where and when to apply them, and some feeling (on the order of magnitude level) of what is “good.” Overall, the quantity of questions felt proportional to the five Body of Knowledge areas.
- A calculator was required for 5-10% of the questions. The non-programmable calculator allowed in the test center was sufficient to answer any of those questions where a calculator was useful.
- Real world experience and benchmarking knowledge are crucial to success. You should know how a maintenance planner should spend their time and what typical and “good” results are in a variety of M&R metrics. Know how to keep people involved and empowered without abdicating management responsibility for either the efforts or the results.
