Complaint Review: Institute of Project Management America

We received an email advertising this 4-day course through official channels at my office. When I registered for the course, I received a follow-up phone call, an agenda packet, and a receipt for the $995 registration fee - all of which is perfectly normal and expected. The course for which I registered was to be held in Memphis, TN, a few hours from where I live, so I booked a hotel and planned to be out of the office for a week.

The class was scheduled to run from Tuesday through Friday. Each day would be a full day resulting in fulfillment of the education requirement for the PMP exam. When I arrived to the classroom on Tuesday morning there were several other attendees already there and I was told we had no instructor. On top of that, the conference center where the class was being held had not been able to get in touch with the company for several weeks. Several participants had been trying to reach the company as well and were not successful. We waited for 2 hours while the confernece center and a few class members continued to reach out, but eventually we gave up and went back to our respective hotels or homes.

Around noon, just as everyone was packed up and ready to leave we all received an email from IPMA/APM apologizing for the missing instructor, providing a dropbox account of classroom information, and stating that a substitute instructor would be provided the next day. The majority of our group decided to stay and give them the benefit of the doubt, but as the afternoon wore on we were still not able to get a live person from the company on the phone. To add to our concern, the conference center informed us that they had only received payment for the first day of class and would not be able to provide classroom space the following day unless the instructor arrived with payment for the balance. Needless to say we were all very wary of this situation, but as our hotel rooms were non-refundable and it was already late in the day, we decided to roll the dice.

Not surprisingly, there was no instructor when we arrived on the second day. The conference center informed us that they did receive a response and payment for the room late the previous evening, but had not been able to get in touch with the company after that. We went through the same process fo trying to call for about 30 minutes, but by 9am we were done. 

After arriving home another group member sent some links where she found that there were already several complaints about this company scamming either participants or venues.