CRM Part 1 vs Part 2 - are the prep strategies really that different?

Part 2 has a lot of questions blending technology with legal admissibility and litigation hold. I studied them as separate topics and got caught out. Scored 74% first attempt, 81% on the retake once I understood the overlap.

The CIP overlap with Part 1 is real but don't get overconfident. The CRM tests application depth in a way the CIP doesn't - you need to be able to design retention schedules and justify them, not just define them. I'd call it 65% overlap, not 90%.

I took them 6 months apart rather than the same window - Part 1 in spring, Part 2 that fall. Glad I did because Part 2 took way more prep than expected. The storage media lifecycle and digital forensics sections were almost foreign territory for me.

ICRM scheduling through Pearson VUE is pretty standard. You can book both in the same week if seats are available at your testing center. I'd just caution against back-to-back days - I sat Part 2 the morning after Part 1 and it was too much.

I'm in a similar boat and honestly the biggest shift for me between the two parts was just accepting that Part 2 isn't harder, it's just asking different things. With Part 1 you can kind of brute-force your way through if you know the principles cold, but Part 2 really punishes you if you're just pattern-matching to answers. What clicked for me was going through every practice question I got wrong and figuring out exactly why the wrong answers were wrong, not just why the right one was right. The distractors in Part 2 are sneaky because they're often true statements that just don't answer what was actually asked.

Your CIP background is going to help more than you think, especially on information governance overlap, but don't assume it transfers everywhere. The risk and security domains caught me off guard because the framing is different from what I expected. I actually found the free crm risk management security questions useful for drilling that section specifically since it's easy to feel shaky on terminology even when you understand the concepts. Good luck with both parts in the same window, it's doable if you budget your review time by domain weight rather than just splitting it evenly.