About the Exam

BPM certification supports the advancement of BPM professionals by providing a way to measure and document the knowledge and skills required to be recognized as a competent practitioner. BPM certification helps employers define job objectives, evaluate position candidates, assess employee performance and motivate employees to enhance their skills and knowledge. Certified BPMPs enhance their professional experience by obtaining recognition of their competency, and proving that they are professionally qualified to practice their profession.

The exam covers the elements of the BPM discipline which includes Concepts and Principles, Process Modeling, Process Improvement (Analysis & Design), Process Measurement, Process Technologies (BPMN, BPMS), BPM Governance and BPM Center of Excellence. Certified BPMPs are able to demonstrate the knowledge and skills to be productive members of a BPM team. These skills include building hierarchical process models, using tools to analyze and assess process performance, defining critical process metrics, using best practice principles to redesign processes, developing process improvement project plans, building a center of excellence and establishing process governance.

From the Analysts

“Lack of sufficient business process skills continues to dog progress and momentum for enterprise wide business process management (BPM) initiatives. Yet when it comes to growing BPM skills, most programs adopt a wait-and-see attitude in hopes that the required skills will evolve organically as the program matures. Ultimately, this wait-and-see attitude leads to an ongoing over-reliance on BPM software vendor professional services and systems integrator resources, eating away at crucial return on investment (ROI) that could be invested back into new BPM projects and resources.”

– Forrester Research

It’s no coincidence that those organizations with the most successful BPM programs also have a well defined skills development program. The current business process “skills gap” in most organizations is needlessly delaying the improvement of enterprise wide business processes.

In recent Gartner surveys, respondents cited a lack of resources and a lack of expertise as two of the top three reasons for their BPM initiatives failing – the first being organizational politics. This resource constraint is being felt by end-user, vendor, and consulting and system integration (C&SI) organizations alike. The skill set required to be successful in BPM is broad and deep, requiring a blend of hard and soft skills, from process modeling to organizational change management.

“BPM certification has the potential to add value in four different scenarios:

1. Hiring managers can use BPM certification to gain a better understanding of the knowledge, experience and credibility of a candidate against an independent industry standard. This can help to determine if the candidate’s BPM skills are a good fit for their organizations’ skill requirements for BPM.
2. BPM professionals or aspiring professionals can benefit from BPM certification as independent validation of their competence and experience, which can improve career development and progression.
3. BPM practitioners within organizations that already use BPM can use certification to improve the existing skills and knowledge of both themselves and their teams.
4. BPM practitioners who are looking to hire an external consultant to support their BPM programs will find certification a useful evaluation of a consultant’s real expertise.

However, this scenario depicts the desired state for BPM certification. At present, a number of organizations offer some kind of BPM training and certification, but there is no common agreed-on industry standard between them. The market for BPM certification is immature at present but is steadily growing.”

– Gartner

Test Development

In order to ensure that the Certified Business Process Management Professional exam represents a fair and accurate evaluation of a person’s knowledge, skill and ability, the exam was created in conjunction with an independent third-party BPM exam certification committee and was developed under procedures to specifically address the national standards for fairness in testing to address validity and reliability. The result is an assessment that is not only accurate but a fair assessment of BPM professionals.

Test development procedure included:

• Domain Analysis
• Job Task/Competency Analysis
• Blueprint Development
• Item Writing Training
• Item Development
• Item Editing
• Technical Review
• Statistical Validation and Item Selection
• Forms Build and Equating
• Standard Setting