Expert tier: allocating investment across a portfolio and stopping work that no longer earns its place.
Portfolio management is mostly the discipline of stopping things. Any organisation can start work; few can kill a project that has a sponsor, a team and eighteen months of sunk cost behind it.
This examination assesses the judgement that makes that possible: reading a portfolio against strategy, comparing incomparable investments, and holding a governance line when the pressure is political rather than technical.
It sits in the Programme & Portfolio track at Expert tier, and is issued with a unique credential ID, a two-year validity period and an independently hosted digital badge.
Senior practitioners with portfolio or PMO accountability — people who decide what gets funded, what continues and what stops. This is the highest tier we assess and it assumes substantial programme or multi-project experience.
The paper is weighted across five domains. Weightings show how much of the examination each area accounts for, so preparation can be planned against them.
| Domain | Weighting | |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Delivery planning and scope control | 25% |
| 02 | Stakeholder engagement and governance | 20% |
| 03 | Risk, issue and dependency management | 20% |
| 04 | Schedule, cost and resource discipline | 20% |
| 05 | Closure, benefits and lessons learned | 15% |
Portfolio accountability is a small market, and credibility matters more than volume of applications. An Expert-tier credential is a short, checkable statement that your judgement has been externally assessed at this level.
Yes. The Expert tier assumes you are already working on live delivery. There is no formal hours requirement, but the examination is written for practitioners who have made real trade-offs on real work.
Online, monitored by a live proctor alongside automated integrity checks. You book a slot after enrolling and can sit it from home or your workplace.
Two years from issue. The expiry date is printed on the certificate and shown on the public verification record, so a lapsed credential is always visible.
A certificate carrying a unique credential ID and verification QR code, plus a digital badge hosted independently by LiveCertification for LinkedIn, a CV or an email signature.
Yes, without contacting us. Every credential ID resolves on our public register, and the digital badge carries its own independent verification page.
You receive a result breakdown by domain so you know where to focus. A retake can be booked from your dashboard at a lower fee than the original enrolment.