The First Credential: My Path to CAPM

Recording of the free INSTAR webinar held on 23 September 2026. The session is in Ukrainian.

Andrii Chychyrkin was not working as a project manager when he started preparing for the CAPM. He holds a PhD in Law and has spent his career in legal practice. His employer offered him a project manager role and paid for the training on one condition: a PMI certification, so that HR and his colleagues would have no further questions. He passed the exam on 13 June.

In conversation with Natalia Starynska he walks through the whole path: how he prepared, where he went wrong, what he did with his mistakes, what the exam looks like from the inside, and how long it actually took.

Three things worth knowing before you register.

The CAPM asks for no project experience. It does ask for English. The first conclusion Andrii reached during practice tests was that his gap was language rather than project management. The CAPM is available in English only, with no translations. Aim for B2 and roughly a minute and twenty seconds per question. Natalia adds a recent case: a participant failed the PMP twice because of English.

The course makes you eligible. The practice tests are what get you through. The mandatory 23 hours qualify you to apply. Andrii is direct about this being insufficient on its own. He calls the tests and mock exams in the learning portal a must have, and went through them roughly three full times. The mock questions rotate every attempt and deliberately never match the real exam word for word. The point is not memorising answers. After several rounds you develop what he calls a project management mindset: you start to see which answer can be right even on a topic you do not know well.

The most useful advice in the conversation sells less than it could. If you already have three years of project management experience, Andrii suggests reading the PMP requirements and going straight for the PMP. The CAPM exists for people with no experience or not enough of it.

A large part of the conversation covers the exam itself: the mandatory system check, prohibited applications, four photographs of your workspace, the proctor, 150 questions in three hours, flags, the break after question 75 during which video and audio keep recording, and the score report that shows a coarse scale across four domains with no detail per question.

Speaker

Andrii Chychyrkin, CAPM. Founder of a law firm, PhD in Law, attorney, forensic expert, economist, philologist, teacher, project manager.

Host: Natalia Starynska, PMP, Senior Consultant at INSTAR.

The webinar is in Ukrainian.